


Restless Wanderer

by intothesilentland



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1870s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cornwall is beautiful, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Farmer Dean Winchester, First Meetings, Fluff, Getting to Know Each Other, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, John Winchester Being an Asshole, M/M, Pining, Sexual Tension, Shepherd Castiel, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Tenderness, farmer au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:06:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 69,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27071713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothesilentland/pseuds/intothesilentland
Summary: Just east of the town Porthgwarra, Cornwall, Robert Singer’s farm lies, a mess of ravaged land gaping out onto a fretting sea. Robert's orphaned godson, Dean Winchester, is named sole beneficiary of the farm - and though he hasn't seen his godfather in fifteen years, he travels across the Atlantic with his brother and half brother to care for Singer in his old age and tend to the farm. All of them hope to leave behind the squalor and famine of their old life.What Dean meets is the bird-infested home of a widowed eccentric, and a new shepherd whom he can neither stand nor see any use for - stoic, rude and conceited, Dean plans to fire the mysterious and wandering Mr Novak the moment he comes into legal possession of the farm. But upon the shepherd's offer to teach him the trade, in anticipation of Dean replacing the man himself, Dean finds in the wild and roaming man a steadiness and certainty his own life has never yet contained. And one day Dean will have to ask, not tell, the shepherd to stay.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 140
Kudos: 209





	1. Gulls

**Author's Note:**

> Weird! that this is my first story after to build a home. I'm all parts fear that this won't live up to it, worry that I won't get as attached to it, concern that the writers are gonna ruin these characters for us forever... But, once more unto the breach, I guess. This will be a lot less upsetting than TBaH. It'll still be a slow burner, though (I have a brand!) - less slow than TBaH, but then, twenty five years is a LONG time to wait before confessing your love to someone. Hard to beat. 
> 
> The title is a nod to Steinbeck's East of Eden, and Genesis 4, which he got it from: "When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth."
> 
> What you can expect:
> 
> \- soft but stubborn farmboys in love  
> \- taking ages to realise it  
> \- folk music  
> \- IRISH CAS  
> \- steinbeck meets hardy?  
> \- lots of birds  
> \- IRISH CAS  
> \- I'm not a historian
> 
> Alright. That's all. Enjoy.

I wish I were on yonder hill  
'Tis there I'd sit and cry my fill  
And every tear would turn a mill

I wish I sat on my true love's knee  
Many a fond story he told to me  
He told me things that ne'er shall be

Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin  
Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin  
Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom  
Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán

[Go, go, go, my love  
Go quietly and go peacefully  
Go to the door and fly with me  
May you go safely, my darling]

His hair was black, his eye was blue  
His arm was strong, his word was true  
I wish in my heart I was with you

Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin  
Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin  
Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom  
Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán

[Go, go, go, my love  
Go quietly and go peacefully  
Go to the door and fly with me  
May you go safely, my darling]

_Dean,_

_I have started seeing your face in the hills. This is how I know it’s time. I am sore to leave you and yet—there is a time for all things. Perhaps the trees feel sorrow at the shedding of their leaves each autumn. Perhaps you feel some sorrow at my going, too. I cannot pretend to know your heart, though I’ll admit I’ve longed to, for some seasons._

_I will see you again, I know, in the hills and grasses of wherever my roaming shall take me. Whether you see me again, is up to you. I do not know._

_You have held my heart captive two winters. I expect I shall leave it with you, even when my liberated body sets sail for America._

_Just so, I am yours:_  
_Your faithful servant, shepherd, lonely and wandering guide,  
_ _Castiel._

Just east of the town Porthgwarra, St. Levan, Robert Singer’s farm lies, a mess of ravaged land gaping out onto a fretting sea. In the farmhouse which sits within a knot of restless hummocks cresting and falling, Robert Singer limps from room to room, awaiting the arrival of his lately orphaned godson, and this godson’s younger brothers.

“Godson” seems a generous name to the boy in question, who can no longer be called boy, but man, and has not seen his godfather in fifteen of his twenty-four winters. What he remembers of Robert is gruff and sarcastic, round for someone so tall and now, apparently, nearly bedridden.

At the bow of a ship from New York to Plymouth, Dean Winchester stands, watching the waves hulk around the boat, loping over ice waters. His younger brother Sam is beside him, watching the waves and fascinated by the waters which, for all their churning, seem to boil. Beside _him_ is their bastard brother, Adam, the product of their father’s inability to think beyond a present tense need, or to look at the wants and hurts of others.

John dead, Mary long dead, and Adam alone following Kate Milligan’s fall to cholera, Sam insisted that Adam accompany them to a desolate farm owned by a desolate man, thousands of miles from the cracked earth and beating sun of Kansas. It’s only on account of Sam’s insistence that the illegitimate product of John Winchester’s baser desires—and there were many—is allowed to follow them. Dean will _not_ be the boy’s ward.

John dead, Mary long dead, Mr Singer sending word across the sea that Dean is his sole beneficiary and to inherit the farm after his passing, which Robert speaks of with a prophetic, apocalyptic sense of immediacy… Dean has more than enough to worry about. Caring for Robert is now a duty—of thanks, of unspoken contract. Caring for Sam is an imperative, a priority—always will be. Caring for Adam never came into the equation until Kate’s passing, when Sam insisted, and insisted with even more vehemence when Robert’s letter arrived, that familial duty extended even to the bonds of bastard sons.

Dean remembers an open land of sun and empty pockets—at least for him and his brothers. This is the land he has left. He has heard of England as a sodden country where the gray moods of its inhabitants manifest the weather. But for the first time in his life, Dean will own property, gray or not. Leaps of faith are made easier when the foundations one is jumping from threaten to crumble any minute.

Still, his memories are like teeth against his abraded heart.

Ocean wind beats about Sam’s long hair, long enough to take shears to. Dean has joked repeatedly on this journey, which has spanned many weeks, from Kansas all the way to New York, New York slowly to Plymouth, that Sam will be mistaken for one of the shaggier sheepdogs on the farm they travel to. Sixteen days at sea, and they’re _finally_ drawing near. They must be the only damned souls trying to _enter_ England from America—for four decades, _everyone_ around the British Isles has been trying to leave, like England is a stroke of bad luck as well as subjugation: the Irish, during and following the famine; the Scottish, during the Highland Clearances. The whole world is fleeing England like a bad smell, pushing west, and Dean and his brothers seem to be the only poor bastards travelling _to_ it, east, against the current of migrants desperate for a better life. So what is it they are travelling toward, and what will meet them when they arrive?

At least the predominant direction of migration means the sanitation on this boat is better than those swarmed with people, and headed to America. Souls huddled together, rancid water which flipped the stomach, typhus… Well. It’s well past the turn of a new decade: 1874—perhaps those days are gone. Perhaps not: Dean has heard rumours of the streets of London, mired in fog—smog so thick you can barely see the faces of houses at the other side of the road—streets covered in soot and disease, where the problem of poverty is solved through eviction. He’s been glad to have grown as a farm hand all his life, away from the stifles of city life and the press of other eyes. A rising tide of sadness swells in him, thinking of their home at the edge of the Great Plains, the vast expanse of freedom which met Dean’s gaze every time he rose his eyes above the corn he we reaping, the vines he was tending to, the ruddy earth he was ploughing.

Corn reaping is gone. The golden fields are gone. Robert’s letter came, not a moment too soon: grasshoppers are shearing through the fields of Kansas farms even as the ship Dean stands at, stomach turning, bounces along the intrusive waves toward a port of a new city. What ravages will be left of Dean’s old home when they are done, he has now idea.

And from Plymouth, to a backwards farm with no doubt backwards people, and with Robert’s no doubt insane demands for its care and upkeeping as well as his own, without so much as a thank you to water them down, only his gruff and snide comment and perhaps, if Dean is lucky, a swig of his constant supply of whiskey.

Hold a match within ten feet of Robert Singer, and he’d burst into flames. His breath could be bottled and used to run steamboats. Cut him, and he’d bleed enough ethanol to warm a village during winter.

Robert married an English woman when Dean was eight, well-to-do and with not quite enough blue blood in her to call her noble but certainly in possession of some land, occupying the strange liminal space of the middle classes in England. The two moved to Cornwall, not to be seen again. Word came back that Mrs Singer had died in childbirth, the infant too, when Dean was twelve. By this time, John Winchester was too far gone in rum and rage to care much about his oldest friend across a cold, starlit sea—he was also too busy, it turned out, sleeping with the mother of Adam and siring a son he couldn’t afford the care of. And now the responsibility of care has fallen, as it always does, onto Dean’s shoulders.

People bustle around them. Less rancid by far than the boats crowded by impoverished masses from Liverpool, Exeter, Southampton, Plymouth, the place still reeks below deck. Dean has opted, more nights than one, to stand shivering at the hull, the stars above him his only company, hauling his sack coat round him and wishing John had bought _him_ a thick woollen greatcoat, like he did for Adam on the boy’s tenth birthday. With money _Dean_ had earnt the family.

The wind might lash his face, his skin might grow stiff from the cold and the spray of salt, but he needs the space to clear his thoughts, to honour and dwell on the land he’s leaving, will perhaps never be able to honour and dwell on again.

He sniffs.

Sam glances over to him.

Kansas was easy to farm. The land was sunbitten but flat and tenable. You could see for miles: keep an eye on cattle while you swept your employer’s front porch; glance up at the sun, anywhere, and know the time and what the weather would be, come evening. Dean knew the land, knew the smell of the first day of harvest, knew what earth was good and would yield to spill out in vibrant crops and what soil would make the fruit taste sour, come fall. A fount of knowledge and love for the beaten ground he spent two decades on, wasted, on account of having nowhere left to roam.

Dean sighs.

“What do you want?” He asks his brother, a little harsher than intended, but Sam, growing steadily into manhood, has had ample opportunity to get used to the hard bites of sentence which labourers will offer him for looking with intended words instead of speaking them.

“Another day’s travel,” Sam says, “and then we’ll have arrived. I spoke to the captain this morning.”

“And then how long?” Dean asks.

Sam looks at him, nonplussed.

“How long, from there, to the farm?”

“Oh,” Sam blinks. “Well, from the coachstation, a day’s travel.”

“Stagecoach is expensive,” Dean shakes his head. “We’ve already spent a fortune shipping this one over here, with us,” he gestures to Adam, who squirms, looking away.

“I doubt we can walk it.”

“We have legs.”

“We’ve been travelling for nearly a month…”

“Then what’s a few days longer?” Dean asks. Adam looks down as Dean speaks, knowing this pertains most to him: the boy hasn’t worked a day in his life, and wiry, barely approaching adolescence, he’ll struggle to keep up on the long walk to the Cornish coast.

 _“I’ll_ pay for the stagecoach,” Sam grumbles, to which Dean glowers. Wind whips at Sam’s hair as he speaks, he raises his voice above the knife-slash of the waters. “I have money saved from my time working for the Braedens.”

This is loaded. Sam lost his job working for that family because Mr Braeden caught Dean down the alley beside the tavern locked in an embrace with his daughter, one dark-haired Miss Lisa Braeden. He doesn’t regret the many punches swung at him by her father—Dean has gotten in trouble before for charming, courting and seducing young women beyond his station—but he does regret Sammy losing his job.

Dean clamps his jaw and stares out at the horizon. Vaguely, in the far distance, a hulking gray mass of land approaches from beneath the white vale of clouds. Gulls have begun screeching around the boat, riding the rippling air above it and tilting about like puppets with their strings pulled taut above the air.

The next few hours, the bleak mass grows bigger, slowly fleshing out into dull and muted colours. Adam watches excitedly from the hull, a little way away from Dean. Sam is caught in conversation with a painter returning from his travels to North Carolina. The man is too intentionally bohemian to be actually impoverished; it rubs Dean up the wrong way. He stares angrily at the washing, cold waters. His father, the vagrant that he was, ensured that never in Dean’s life would he have a strong sense of place, belonging, roots. Or so he’d thought: now he realises it was the soil he tilled, the wheat which unfolded into grain in his hands, the chirruping streams he would bathe himself in, tiny fishes intrigued by this tall, unscaled intruder nipping lightly at his heels.

The new old country draws closer across the calming waters. Adam, when he has them, directs his questions to Sam, fearful of Dean’s bitten and scathing answers.

Plymouth is a strange and shuddering city, Sam comments that Dean would like it more were the weather not so haggard and gray, but Dean replies that the weather is all _part_ of it: no more the ruddy golden light of sunsets in Kansas, the greendawns opening like a window in summer to fields cloaked in mist and haze, ready for the tending. How anything but sorrow can grow in England is beyond Dean; stone buildings rise on every side dull and uncompassionate, not like the warm wooden frames in the centre of the towns Dean is used to, with their alleys smelling sweet with rot and heat in spite of the ammonia occasionally stinging the air. Here is a barricade to the senses, nothing subtle, everything grim.

Dean pays for the stagecoach—which is, probably, what Sam planned for all along. They catch it late into the night, Adam seems sad there’s little of the landscape he’ll be able to make out, but soon falls asleep on Sam’s shoulder in the awkward, jolting carriage, starting awake often at every ditch and hump the rickety wooden wheels encounter. The stagecoach stops a few miles short of Singer’s farm, which the coach driver refers to more than once as ‘the Eerie’—probably some in-joke about how God-forsaken the place must be. The man in tones and language Dean has to frown to understand, directs them along a long dirt road cloaked on either side by trees. They get lost more than once before finding their way so that from their journey from Plymouth to the coachstation to Mr Singer’s farm, evening has dipped into night and again, rises into the mists of dawn. Eventually the damp and treecloaked path opens out into view of Mr Singer’s farmhouse, clothed in thin wisps of fog and blanketed by hills.

The house is big, though not quite big enough to be called grand, and would be called square were it not for the unexpected turns in its architecture and the stables and storehouses adjoining either side of it, and would be called gray, were it not for the surprising warmth of hue in the stone, and the ivy crawling over its face.

Dean blinks blearily and won’t admit aloud that yes, walking all the way from _Plymouth_ would’ve been a very bad idea indeed, but he certainly thinks it.

They approach the door. The grounds are still and breathing with waiting for the promise of dawn. The grass is greener than Dean expected, or indeed has ever seen—even under the dim and misted light of a November dawn it glows emerald and verdant. A few animal sounds rise about them: pigs in their pens making vague noises of piqued interest, perhaps the expectation of breakfast; chickens tutting nervously and flapping in small gestures as they jostle by one another. A goose watches, wary, as they pass, and offers a hiss to the strangers, but little else.

“Will anyone even be awake?” Sam asks, brow knotted with concern. Dean doesn’t even want to entertain the thought of them sitting out on the doorstep in the crisp cold until the house lopes into life.

“If they’re not, we’re wakin’ em,” he answers, climbing up the steps to the door.

“Won’t that be rude?” Adam asks, obviously worried, but Dean ignores him. He clatters the rope tied to the bell so that it makes the geese and chickens exclaim loudly, flustering about in alarm, he hammers at the door knocker, the pretty brass face of a young Grecian boy.

“Dean,” Sam sighs, but a sound comes from the other side of the door, an awful lot like a curse.

Dean turns to his brother with a smirk, to which Sam rolls his eyes.

“Told you I’d wake someone up.”

“Yes, and a _great_ first impression you’ve made, too.”

Before Dean can snark something back, the door is swung open with a huff.

“If you’re selling something—”

Dean turns back to the door. A girl—Sam’s age, perhaps a little younger, stands at it. Obviously a servant: Dean can tell that much by the faded brown of her dress, the grease on her apron, the wisps of blonde hair about her face loosened by work, and the smear of coal over her left brow. Clearly, she’d been preparing for the day, lighting fires and heating up the house, when Dean’s tumult interrupted her. And clearly, she’s not happy about it.

“I’m Dean Winchester,” Dean interrupts, holding out his hand to her, which she squints at, and doesn’t take. “This is my brother, Sam.”

“And our brother, Adam,” Sam adds, when it’s made clear Dean isn’t bothering to introduce him. “We’re sorry to be arriving so early—it’s been a long journey—”

“I know. I’ve made it,” the serving girl answers, and Dean realises that she has a West Coast accent.

“You’re an American?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she states,

“You’re the boys Mr Singer sent for.”

 _“Sent for?”_ Dean repeats, indignantly. “I’m his _heir—”_

“We’re very tired,” Sam interjects quickly, and Dean casts him an angry look. He doesn’t need his brother to mediate for him. “We’ve been travelling some time—I’m sure you’d understand, having taken the journey, too. We’d be grateful if we could take the weight off our feet.”

The girl sighs and steps aside, holding open the door for them. Dean is tempted to mention that as the future _owner_ of this house, and all the lands surrounding it, she ought to treat her position with him as more open to evaluation than she seems disposed to. He doesn’t, of course. Unused to being a man of any note, let alone a landowner, let alone a landowner with _servants,_ he abides her quiet insolence.

“The parlour is this way,” she says, and leads them through the house. Dean turns to his brother and mouths _‘parlour?’,_ impressively, and Sam smirks and shrugs. They drop their packs by the door on her request.

The hall is cluttered with paintings and brass metalwork, which Dean can tell Sam is resisting the temptation to bend over and examine, and several big mirrors which sit, unmounted, on the floor. The wood is darkened with age and the staircase twines along the far wall like ivy. The place seems to breathe around them like a forest peopled by strange and abstract creatures.

The girl leads them to a room on the left.

Dean stops short as soon as he enters, causing first Sam, then Adam, to bump into him.

 _“Dean,”_ Sam huffs, but Dean is far too distracted.

The room—large, large enough to comfortably seat a dozen people, and then some—is peopled with gold and wiry cages, metal webbing crafted into bell shapes, ceiling to floor, with chattering, nervous, excited, flittering birds. Ordinary, unremarkable birds, most likely carrying all manner of diseases: thrushes and finches and sparrows and blackbirds. Dean frowns, shaking his head—a madhouse? His inheritance is a _madhouse?_

“Mr Singer’s birds,” the girl says, weaving around the cages. “They keep him company.”

“And lots of it, I see,” Dean murmurs in assent. The girl glances at him and flickers a smile.

“They’re very talkative.”

“I’ll bet.”

The room glitters with the sound of the birds, and the sight of their darting about from perch, to cage bars, to perch.

“Please, sit,” the girl gestures to some chairs gathered round a small table beside an unlit fireplace. Kindling and logs are piled there, dried brush to encourage flames. The girl spots Dean rubbing his hands and eyeing the unlit space, and smirks. “I’ll set to warming the place up,” she offers.

“Thank you,” Sam smiles. Dean slumps onto a chair, Adam follows suit.

“And I’ll call on someone to take your bags,” she says, bending down beside the kindling with a struck match and, at a steady whistle of air from her mouth, blows the flame into tongues of life.

Dean flushes at the thought of the measly belongings he, Sam and Adam brought with them across an ocean, into a new country, new continent, new old world. Surely whoever picks them up, even the lowest servant in this house, would have more in the world to their name than him and his brothers.

The fire grows hungrily, licking at its fuel. The girl turns to face them, looking pleased at the effort.

“My name’s Harvelle, by the way,” she says brightly. “Joanna Beth. Everyone calls me Jo. You can, too—this house is strange. You won’t find much cause to call me Miss, so don’t. And Mr Singer’s sure to be around, soon. He likes to feed the birds himself.”

“Thank you, Jo,” Sam smiles. Dean gives her a nod, and stares into the flames.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty? We’ve fresh bread, and eggs, and milk.”

All of those sound nice. Adam’s stomach makes a sound like he thinks so, too. The girl, Jo, smirks, and takes her leave, saying she’ll get something to them as soon as possible.

Dean stares at the fire while Sam speaks.

“The house is—is pretty.”

“Pretty weird,” Dean mutters.

“Well, the birds are eccentric,” Sam admits, and Dean rolls his eyes as he watches the flames. Slowly, surely, warmth is creeping into his fingers, again. He wipes his running nose on his sleeve. “But—but that isn’t a bad thing…” Sam tries, uncertainly.

“It sure ain’t a good thing, either,” Dean counters, frowning at the glowing logs. The birds chirrup around them in flashes of soft bright sound.

“I like them,” Adam states, and Dean breaks his gaze from the flames to shoot a look at the boy.

“Well, if Robert takes in broken birds, surely there’s hope for us,” Sam smiles uneasily. “It seems he’s got a good heart.”

“That, or he’s gone soft in the head,” Dean quips, and of course, with his luck, this is the moment he spots Mr Singer at the doorway. He balks. Sam flickers a frown and turns to follow Dean’s gaze, before spotting the old man and coughing what’s probably a laugh at Dean’s remarkable ability to end up with a foot in his mouth at every possible turn. They haven’t even been here an _hour._

Robert Singer is more hunched than Dean remembers. Six decades old, his legs have begun to crumple to the mysterious cause of an unknown diagnosis. He walks with two canes.

Dean bolts into standing on instinct—something of the lessons in respect John drilled into him, since infancy—lessons the man barely taught Sam, and _never_ taught Adam. These lessons kick in at the subconscious knowledge that Robert Singer and John Winchester were once brothers in the arms of agriculture.

“Rober—Mr Singer,” Dean fumbles, “I’m—please excuse me, I didn’t—”

Mr Singer huffs out a laugh and raises his shoulders in an odd gesture which, Dean guesses, is meant to resemble a shrug.

“Child—it’s been how long?” He asks with a gruff laugh. Dean prickles at the address he’s given, but in a second, as he limps into the room, Robert says, “—too long to get away with calling you child, it seems?” He chuckles. The birds, at the moment he appeared at the doorway, and the moment he began to speak, have started twittering excitedly, tiny incomprehensible conversations with the old man.

“I’ll turn twenty-five, come January,” Dean answers, instead of confirming or denying.

“Twenty-five?” Mr Singer repeats with an incredulous look. He has finally made it over to where Dean stands—Dean realises he probably should have approached the other man himself, but all too late. He steps away from his chair just in time for Mr Singer to reach out and clap his shoulder quickly, cane still in hand, before regaining his balance. “And no wife? No sweetheart?”

Dean, taken aback by the familiarity Robert chooses to address him with, says,

“None that’ll settle for me,” with a shrug.

Sam snorts into his closed fist, knowing Dean better than Mr Singer, and knowing that Dean has had an enduring inability to tether his heart to any post or person, since John discovered Dean’s love affair with Cassie Robinson, and after opting to assault Dean rather than her, which was a relief beyond relief, once again uprooted the lives of his sons in moving towns and migrating north, east, west, south, wherever he might reasonably go to drink and be happy and untaunted by the drunks at the local tavern. John was all too happy to do this. Even if it meant puncturing forever Dean’s realest sense of happiness in all his adult life: Cassie Robinson had once been an answer to the restlessness inside of Dean. Now nothing is.

Sam has stood, and shakes Roberts hand when it’s offered to him. Adam does the same, and introduces himself, but Mr Singer treats him as though he already knows the boy as well as Dean.

“There’s not much in the way of company, for a young boy, here,” Mr Singer says apologetically. “Unless you like birds,” he gestures humorously to the twittering creatures around him, who grow louder every minute they remain ignored.

“They’re beautiful,” Adam answers, and Dean resents him for it, and resents him for how it makes Robert smile as though already, he has a favourite. This pricks at Dean’s heart like thorns at bare skin.

“Would you like to feed them?” Robert asks, and on Adam’s polite and enthusiastic confirmation, followed by a _Sir,_ he insists they call him ‘Bobby’.

Perhaps less of a drunk than Dean remembers—but then, it’s only dawn.

One pale brown bird has pride of place in the centre of the room. Its cage is worn and romantic, the bird peaks about with pinprick movements of its head, watching the world of the parlour with interest.

Dean moves slowly around its cage; it tracks his movement.

“Ah, I see you’ve taken to Elowen,” Bobby smiles, so that the lines around his eyes stretch out to his temples like bands of light. Dean is nonplussed. “The nightingale,” Bobby clarifies. “I named her Elowen. I found her beneath an elm tree. Broken wing. Elowen—that’s Cornish for elm tree.”

Dean didn’t even realise Cornish was a _language._ He hopes he doesn’t have to learn it.

“When Andromache’s father dies in Homer’s Illiad,” Bobby says, and addresses this more to Sam than to Dean, because Dean has turned his attention to the trilling, tumbling chatter of the nightingale, “Mountain Nymphs plant elms on his tomb.”

“You said its wing was broken,” Dean looks up, over the cage, to where Bobby stands.

“What was that?”

“You said its wing was broken,” Dean repeats, gesturing to the bird. “Looks fine, now.”

“Her,” Bobby corrects.

“Her,” Dean amends. “Her wing looks fine, now. I can’t even tell which was broken.”

Bobby shifts a little sheepishly.

“I’m having trouble letting her go,” he admits, something touchingly human in the motion. Dean twitches a smile.

“She’s pretty,” he admits. The bird trills again.

“She likes you,” Bobby smiles, though Dean suspects this isn’t true, and the comment has more to do with the fact Dean payed a compliment to the elegant fawn bird than Dean’s abilities to charm it from beyond the wire bars.

Adam pours seed and chopped apple into each of the cages. Bobby chatters with a few of the birds and Dean raises an eyebrow to Sam, who twitches a forgiving smile at Mr Singer’s eccentricities. When every bird has its food, Bobby suggests giving them a tour of the house. They leave the parlour and, out into the hall again, see that their bags have been moved. Bobby takes them into the kitchen, where Jo is sweeping, and her mother, Mrs Harvelle—Ellen, she insists—prepares their breakfasts. Bacon sizzles in a pan of its own fat, thicker cut than Dean has yet seen it. Bread cools by the window. Adam’s stomach, again, makes that loud and antisocial noise, but Ellen only laughs and insists that they sit down and eat before Bobby drags them any further.

They sit, at a great slab of a beechwood table, and Jo joins them—Dean, in his few brief stints as a servant, is unused to them taking such liberties—but then, Bobby isn’t nobility: he came into this property really by chance, lost his loved ones and, desiring the warmth of company, has perhaps filled it with servants he also considers friends and enough birds to darken the skies.

The breakfast is like a warm weight in Dean’s stomach. Ellen heats milk and pours it into cups for the boys; the bread is still warm when she slices into it, the bacon salty enough to stop Dean from dipping into lightheadedness, which he has been headed toward since about midnight last night. For some time the only sound from the boys is eating—Adam in particular, messy and ravenous with pre-teen appetite. Jo eats and complains about someone—Mick—whom Dean hasn’t yet met, while Bobby chuckles and tells her to look up the word longsuffering, when she has a spare moment.

A scruffy young man appears at the door.

“Are my ears burning?” He asks with a wink, and Jo rolls her eyes.

“You took up the boys’ belongings, Mick?” Bobby asks. The man confirms, picking up a slice of bread and slathering butter on it. He crams it into his mouth and chews as he answers. Jo pulls a face.

“That I did,” he confirms. “Didn’t take long. You travel light,” he says, and addresses this to Dean.

“Up ‘til now, we haven’t had much to our names,” Dean answers tersely.

“I’m an orphan, too,” Mick says, as though he’s sharing the weather. “Mr Singer’s told me all about you,” he explains to Sam, who seems taken aback by his abruptness. He pours himself some milk and drinks it all in one. More bread into his mouth, and he says, “venturing all the way from _America._ Now, I’ve been desperate, but…” He wipes the crumbs off his stubble with his sleeve. “Old man Singer given you the tour yet? You met all his birds?” He grins and winks at Bobby as he says this. “Birds _love_ our Robert.”

“They’ve been in the parlour, Mick, so you can give up the act,” Bobby rolls his eyes.

“Birds means women,” Mick explains to a nonplussed Adam. “As well as the animal.”

“Your wit needs sharpening, Mick,” Ellen says, and hands him a bucket. “And the goat needs milking. Go on, get out of here.”

Mick sighs and leaves through a door leading out to a courtyard surrounded by more farm houses. A few chickens curiously peck their way about the yard there, flapping and dodging Mick when he comes past, swinging the bucket as he walks and possibly aiming it a little more in their direction than necessary.

“Come on,” Bobby sniffs, “let’s show you round the rest of the place.”

Through to the drawing room, which is littered with collared doves, turtle doves, and woodpigeons all cooing happily in burring trills at the entrance of Mr Singer. The walls are a pale blue-gray which, intentionally or not, seems to match the muted shades of the birds. Gilded chairs are scattered about, and match the iridescence of some of the birds. A fireplace sits at one end of the room and is strewn with tiny glass ornaments of… more birds. The paintings about the room are small, not the great grand things expected in old houses this size, houses just enough on the threshold of largeness to make them insecure enough to want to assert, at every opportunity, their own wealth and luxury through the medium of oil paints set to canvas and mounted in golden frames on the wall. Dean steps closer to them while Bobby talks, the man’s voice a vague rumbling in his ears.

One painting, no more than four inches wide, in a deep distressed blue frame, is a small of Mr Singer and his wife. They stand on either side of the fireplace in the very drawing room Dean stands in, now. The painting, however, is devoid of birds. The Singers lean against the pale green of the mantelpiece which is here not covered in tiny glass birds to match those real ones in the room, but with two teal vases, a snuff box, and a small clock of dark wood and gold finishing. A strange painting: the Singers look like two companions, their stance as Dean’s manner would be with other farm hands, rather than the stance of husband and wife. The bottom of Mrs Singer’s faded blue skirts are frayed and dyed pale brown by work outside.

Through again to the dining room. This room is deep and dark and glassy and until Bobby pulls back the curtains and a flash of iridescent colour in the night of the room lights up at every corner, Dean almost doesn’t notice the creatures here in twinkles of starlit cages.

“…Starlings?” Dean asks, growing more and more concerned every room deeper they are taken into the house.

“Yes,” Mr Singer confirms with an absent smile as he slowly limps his way back round the great black table in the centre of the room.

“You, uh,” Dean coughs, “you seem to like them.”

Sam gives Dean a look as if to say that dry comments such as these are _absolutely_ of limits, actually, but Mr Singer doesn’t seem to notice.

“They come in constellations,” Bobby says, “round the autumn. Hundreds of them; they chatter about in the sky and billow like clouds and get themselves hurt. People know me for my love of birds—they come from miles with them, when they’re injured, and get me to fix ‘em up. Seem to think there’s somethin’ romantic in it.”

Only if ‘romantic’ is a blend of the words _ridiculous, manic and lunatic._

“Right,” Dean sighs, “I get it.” At Sammy’s confused expression, he explains, “the stagecoach driver. Kept calling this place ‘the eyrie’.”

Bobby chuckles.

“It’s a nickname the place has earnt, by now.”

“Eyrie?” Adam asks.

“Like a nest,” Dean says, “high up,” and thinks of the hills set about the place. Well, it makes sense. He turns back to Bobby. “I thought they were saying _eerie.”_

“Well, I’m sure the pun helped the nickname catch,” Bobby shrugs, expression more amused than Dean would have expected, considering the ridicule implicit in the nickname. “And I’ve garnered the reputation of being something of an eccentric. Can’t resent people for recognising it.”

Dean nearly spurts out _I can’t think why,_ but catches his tongue just in time. Sam watches him like he knew the words were moments from passing his lips. Adam is fascinated by the birds—which, to be fair, have an unexpected beauty to them: a kaleidoscopic spill of oil on blackened water.

They’re eventually taken up into their rooms—and for the first time in Dean’s life, he won’t be sharing a room with his brother. He’s surprised by the shot of blue on the skyline from his window—he can see the sea, near, just beyond ragged cliffs opening their arms to the blue lash of the Atlantic. The room contains the vaguely bitter smell of dust, barely noticeable, with the salt from the sea carrying lightly over the air. Dean watches fields beyond his window churn in the winds like waters.

The bedframe is handpainted a pale blue. Mick has laid Dean’s belongings, what few of them there are, on the otherwise crisp white sheets. The worn, exposed wooden beams about the room and on the ceiling make the place feel like a cradle. As if on cue, prompted by this comparison, Bobby appears at the doorway and makes Dean’s skin raise by saying:

“This was to be my son’s room.”

Dean shifts awkwardly on his feet. The look in Mr Singer’s eyes—Dean would sometimes see it in John’s eyes, in his more human and vulnerable drunken moments.

“Oh.” Dean doesn’t know what he ought to say. “Well—I thank you for giving it to me…”

Bobby quirks a smile, though it’s a distant one, his gaze set on the waves at the horizon.

“It seemed right.”

How could it? Dean is, when all is said and done, a stranger to the older man. Neither have seen, and barely heard from, the other in over a decade. Dean is a man now, where Mr Singer knew a boy. Sam was an _infant_ when Bobby saw him last, and now Mr Singer has to reckon with the great looming presence which is Sam Winchester, even more great and looming, Dean would imagine, if you were a man pushing seven decades and supported by two crutches.

“You have my thanks, all the same,” Dean answers, and Bobby looks back at him, flashing a smile as if Dean has said the wrong thing. Perhaps, already, he’s wishing he’d chosen Sam or even _Adam_ as the figure to project his desires for a son and grief at having lost one, onto.

“I suppose I ought to show you the farm, now,” Bobby says, and turns out from the distressed white doorframe.

Dean follows after him. Bobby shows them the farm—large, if in mild disrepair, rugged by the nature of the land and the nature of the neglect it has suffered: golden wheat and barley fields loping over the hills. The more rugged of these hills, untenable, are littered with sheep.

“We’ll need to get a shepherd in for these, of course,” Bobby says as they stand at a stile and look out at the bleating animals. Dean frowns.

“Why’s that?”

“Just a few day’s gone, our old shepherd eloped with a young lady from the town. Last I heard, they were headed for St. Ives.”

“No, I mean, why would you need a shepherd, at all? I can handle that.”

Bobby snorts.

“Hmph!”

Dean grows indignant, and can sense Sam bristling behind him, wordlessly begging Dean to drop it, along with his pride.

“I can,” Dean protests, trying not to raise his voice. “I’ve hearded cattle, out in Kansas, I’ve looked after goats and cleared out pigsties—”

“If you think being a shepherd is equal to any of those things,” Bobby snorts, and Dean’s frown furrows deeper into his features.

“No, I think cows are a damn sight bigger, and more dangerous, than sheep—”

“And therefore sheep are easier?” Bobby raises his eyebrows.

“You said it,” Dean crosses his arms and leans against the dry stone wall they stand by.

“I didn’t,” Bobby shakes his head, and spotting Dean’s expression, smirks. “Now see, son, you’re welcome to try your hand at it for the next few days, while I hire a new one. I’m sure you’ll prove capable. I’ve no doubt.“—Dean wants to bite, _it sounds like you do,_ but holds his tongue again. “But shepherding—that’s a _language._ Takes years to speak it. You see to the soil. Someone will see to the sheep.”

Dean grinds his teeth, but says nothing, jaw locking stubbornly. Sam is pulling a face which makes him want to say something he’s certain wouldn’t give Mr Singer a good impression.

“Alright,” Dean says, raising his chin with maybe more pride than he’d like to betray, “What can I start on?”

“Now, it’s well past midday, boy,” Bobby chuckles, “and you’ve been travelling some time. Let’s take some lunch, and let you rest up.”

“We’re here now,” Dean shakes his head. “Might as well set ourselves to work. We can sleep come night—at least, _I_ can. And I’m not a boy.”

Bobby chuckles.

“You’re already my heir, you’ve nothing to prove.”

Dean bristles, but Adam’s stomach growls over the sound of the wind.

“Let’s take lunch,” Bobby continues. “If you’re yet eager to work after that, I’m sure we can set you to something.”

Lunch back in the house is simple: cheese and bread, cold ham and watercress. Adam is yawning so uncontrollably that Ellen, almost cooing, insists that he go to bed for a nap—Bobby seems to raise no objections to this.

Dean glances to his brother.

“To work?” He asks, but Sam snorts and shakes his head.

“Bobby says I’m welcome to spend the day looking through his library.” _Of course._

“It was my wife’s,” Bobby interjects, warmly. “I’ll be glad to see it come to some use, after all these years.”

So Dean goes out, alone, feeling estranged from the house and its inhabitants—Bobby has taken to Sam and Adam, Ellen is already fussing over Adam, Jo has poked several affectionate jokes in Sam’s direction already, and Dean is…

Well, Dean is out in the bright nipping chill of Cornish afternoon air, repairing one of the ploughs as Bobby asked, then mucking out the stables, before sewing the last of the winter wheat, which he does, and does, and does, until the sun has dipped well beyond the jagged ridge of the horizon and Dean has to fumble home in the dark, legs numb with cold and work. While back in the house, the air is thick with heat and food.

Adam is in the kitchen standing over a steaming pot, with Ellen hovering over him, smiling instructions at him.

“And see, the cloves give it warmth,” she says, as Adam tastes whatever it is they cook.

“I see, I see,” he nods, lashes misted by the steam. Dean steps toward them to peer into the pot, but Ellen catches sight of him and stops him short.

“Out,” she shakes her head.

“What?”

“Out,” Ellen repeats, firm enough to make Dean balk. He thought she was a _servant?_ Why— _how—_ is she able to talk to him, in this way? “Look at your boots,” she gestures down to them, and tuts. “Traipsing mud all the way into the kitchen—down the hall,” she shakes her head, exasperated. “What were you, raised in a barn?”

Dean’s expression hardens.

“Pretty much.”

Ellen doesn’t rise.

“Well, not anymore,” she says, and swats at him until he moves back toward the door. “Go get cleaned up. “I’ll have Jo draw you a bath, if you’d like?”

“What about dinner?” Dean asks, hungry _now._

“Mick’s out in town at the corn exchange.”—Why— _why_ did nobody tell Dean about this? He’s the one running the farm now, pretty much. Didn’t anyone think _he_ should attend, too—or at _least_ know about it?! “Now, don’t pull that face, boy,” Ellen shakes her head. “We thought you’d want to rest yourself, your first day. Didn’t realise you’d be out there, working your fingers raw while you were still smelling of saltwater from the boat over.”

Dean grumbles.

“Anyway,” Ellen ignores it, “Mick will be back around the time I expect you’ll be cleaned up and your muscles eased,”—she says this, at least, sympathetically. “We’ll keep some food on the heat, for the both of you. How does that sound?”

Dean reluctantly acquiesces.

As promised, Jo heats him a bath in a copper tub. She insists, however, that he be the one to haul the thing into his room before it is filled, and help her with the filling of it. During the process of heating and filling, Ellen enters with a bundle of lavender seeds and tips them into the tub. The air blossoms in the steam around them, Dean is reluctant to admit how lightening and good it smells, but Ellen must catch something in his expression which betrays this, because she gives him a look which is at once longsuffering and warm.

She also gives him soaps—handmade—and lavender oil, _for your hair, you strange beast,_ when he asks what the hell he’s supposed to do with it.

Bath warmed and filled, Jo and Ellen take their leave to have dinner. Dean sinks into the waters—it’s been how many weeks, since he could last do this? And even then, Dean would mostly bathe in the streams and pools around the farms he worked—no steam rising off the water, no lavender seeds steeping the room in a lash-fluttering dusky scent, no oils for his hair. Dean sighs softly, muscles untwining in the water.

He falls asleep.

He’s woken by Sam dropping a towel on his head.

“Out of the water, or you’ll turn yourself into a prune.”

Dean grumbles, blinking, confused. He shoves the towel from his head onto the floor.

“Ass.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Sam raises his eyebrows. Dean rubs his face with his wet hands. The bath water has turned light and misty with the salt and grit which has risen off his body.

“I guess,” he murmurs, but he’s too sleep-ridden to much know what’s going on, or how he’s feeling. He picks up the towel, stands, and dripping from the bath water, wraps it round himself. “I could get used to these hot baths, I’ll tell you that.”

“I could get used to Ellen’s cooking,” Sam says. “Seriously. Dress yourself, it’s too good to miss.”

Mick is downstairs, at the table in the kitchen and already eating by the time Dean is down.

“Hello-hello,” Mick grins at Dean’s approach. “What’ve we got here? The man of the land. Ellen tells me you’ve been givin’ yourself _blisters_ with work today. Now why would you do a thing like that?”

Dean sits at the table and accepts the bowl Ellen offers him—stew, it seems, with an array of root vegetables and pieces of meat. His head is still heavy with sleep, and the mist—no, steam—coming off the stew hardly helps.

“Adam helped me cook this,” Ellen smiles, handing him a battered pewter spoon.

“I know,” Dean nods. “I saw, just before you kicked me out.”

“Still bitter about that, huh?” Ellen asks with a teasing smile, but Dean simply blinks blearily at her. Mick snorts.

“Give the fella a few minutes, Ellen,” Mick grins, ripping into some bread with his teeth, mouth full. “He might as well have just come out of an opium den, he’s so distant.”

“Now, Mick,” Ellen sighs. “He’s had a long day—a long few _weeks._ You haven’t made that journey, across the Atlantic. _I_ have,” she shakes her head. Herbs hang about from the rafters in bundles, dried and ready for use. She takes a handful of what looks like dried daisies and tips them into a clay cup, pouring some steaming water from a copper kettle into it. “Here, Dean,” she hands the cup to him. “This is for you. Chamomile.” She turns to Mick again. “He hasn’t even had a day’s rest, like his brothers did.”

“Is it a pride thing?” Mick asks, glancing at Dean with eyes too bright with amusement for Dean’s senses, dimmed as they are by exhaustion. “Had to assert yourself, on your first day? Let us know you aren’t some poncey yank, fresh off the boat and never having done an honest day’s work before or since boarding?”

“Mick, is it?” Dean asks. Mick smiles and nods in confirmation. “You talk too much, by far, Mick.”

Ellen snorts a laugh. Mick grins and tears another bite of his bread.

“And here I was, worried you wouldn’t be any fun,” he quips. Dean offers a smile and rolls his eyes, but it’s a little forced. He sips at his drink—it’s faintly sweet, the taste pins itself to the roof of his mouth.

He’s used to the bantering of farmhands, he grew up on it, spent his most formative years offering quips over the evening meal in low-hanging light—usually the meal was oatmeal or if they were lucky, some kind of soup heavy with corn, before the locusts set in. Yes, he’s used to the bantering of farmhands, used to holding his own. But that was before. That was an ocean away. And, he feels a biting urge to remind Mick, he is to be the owner of this house, this farm—and therefore Mick’s employer. The man, scruff faced, spindly and sarcastic as he is, should not make fun of him.

Dean eats his dinner.

Ellen and Mick chatter while Ellen washes the pans and bowls from Adam, Sam, Bobby and Jo. When he’s finished, Mick gets up to help her clean the kitchen. Dean only stares at the table, the wood turning silvery with age. He realises he failed to clean his nails in the bath—well, he spent most of his time in it asleep.

He pushes back his chair, after some time, he isn’t sure how much. He thanks Ellen distractedly for his meal, voice barely above a murmur, and is sure Mick shoots her a wry look at Dean’s ungratefulness. He hardly cares. Out of the kitchen, down the corridor—he passes the room Bobby generously calls a ‘library’—a room with a few square metres’ floorspace, an unnecessarily high ceiling, no windows except one coming in from the very roof of the house, and a curling iron spiral staircase mangled with age climbing up the shelves. There’s barely space for it in the room, an armchair is crammed just beneath it with shelves rising about it on all sides—and there is, of course, a blackbird in a cage with a splint on its leg.

Sam sits on the armchair and pores over a ragged text. Perhaps, in another life, he would’ve been one of those well-to-do boys who finds themselves able to go to college, think, dream, read as though having thoughts is a profession. Well, this isn’t another life—and Sam’s lucky to have had the education he _has_ had. It was a privilege never afforded to Dean. He taught _himself_ to read, which, he feels a twinge of jealousy as he glances to Sam, reading happily, he can barely do.

He’s too humiliated to admit this even to his brother.

He turns up the stairs and trudges up to his room. Tomorrow, more well-rested, he’ll speak with Bobby—get to know the other workers at the farm, let Bobby know that he doesn’t appreciate Mick going to the corn exchange without him, let Bobby know he’s _capable,_ and ought to be entrusted with all the major tasks of the running of this place. Dammit. He had to run his family’s finances for enough years, had to barter for their food running the sums in his head to figure out when he could literally afford to stop haggling. Literate he may not be, but numerate he has most certainly had to become.

Bed. He curls into the thick sheets, which again smell faintly of dust, though also lavender. Ellen must like it—at least, he guesses she made his bed for him. The night is dark outside his window. Someone—Sam, perhaps, while he was downstairs, has lit a candle for him and left it on the modest table beside his bed. His bones ring with a hollow ache. This is a strange new land. A strange new bed. He never thought he’d wish he could hear the sound of Sammy’s snores as he tried to fall asleep, but here Dean is, unable to sleep without them.

He huffs out his candle; the room turns from amber to pitch in a flickered fraction of a heartbeat.

Through the night he hears the soft trilling of a nightingale. He cannot tell if this is in a fit of wakefulness, or only in dreams.


	2. Cuckoo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They meet, they clash, the slowburn begins:)

When Dean wakes up, the white-fog of yesterday has dissipated. The sun is bright for the hour and the time of year: waters shimmer turquoise on the horizon under the orange glow of dawn. Gulls sound on the air with their indignant cries, bobbing in and out of view from among the cliffs. Dean huffs to himself—Bobby doesn’t keep any gulls in the house, at least. Even _he_ must hate them.

Over the next few days, he learns of the farm’s finances, meets every employee and learns their names—and calls them by their names—and works every day, planting apple saplings, loading grain, selling grain, helping with the small harvests of squashes, and of course, struggling with the sheep. This is a farm too large by far, he decides, for a man as frail as Bobby. It’s as rugged as the cliffs, and the sheep just as stubborn and unyielding as the sea even as they freak and scatter in every direction _but_ the one he directs them in. And Dean grows frustrated as the older man’s words on sheep echo in his ears.

_Shepherding—that’s a language. Takes years to speak it._

Maybe it _is_ a language, but Dean will speak it before the fortnight is out. And certainly before the new shepherd arrives. In a few days, Dean is sure, Bobby will be sending word to the poor bastard that actually, they no longer require his services. Bobby’s own godson is _more_ than capable when it comes to these gormless, worm-ridden, panicked creatures.

Dean just knows it.

He can’t work the dogs, either: they seem wary of him, as resentful of him as he is of the very _soil_ of England and its claim over him. Sam bonds with them quickly, which frustrates Dean more—these are _working_ dogs, he insists to his brother, and he ought to treat them as such. Of course Sam refuses.

Adam is barely interested in the farm work. He hangs about from the branches of the taller apple trees—admittedly, he helps with the last of their harvest—and swings about the kitchen helping Ellen with the cooking. Mick teaches him how to play cards and gamble—Adam, having nothing to give, can only bet the boiled sweets made from blackberries that Ellen gives him. Dean only sighs when he finds them playing for the first time, Mick smug with an enormous pile of deep purple candied drops in front of him, Adam with a much meeker pile and looking much meeker for it.

About three weeks into his time at the Eyrie, as he struggles still more with the sheep, this time wrestling one caught at a nail turned loose from a style, he spots a strange wandering figure roaming over the lands. As he watches, the ewe in its panic and bucking nearly headbutts him, twice, once clipping his jaw. He curses, lip flush with blood.

He almost wouldn’t notice the figure: they move like the hills; but they stop to regard him in his tussle with the sheep for a moment. Dean frowns, staring back, as the sheep finally struggles free from his hands and bolts clumsily toward its friends.

The figure watches. A crack appears in their face like a quietly bemused smile at Dean’s struggle, but from the distance, and the broad hat they wear, Dean cannot be sure. A dog lollops over the crest of the hill into view, toward the figure, as though telling him to hurry up. The figure flickers, turns toward the dog, continues roaming after it. Dean would shout—shout that if the dog isn’t off his land in the next ten minutes, Dean will take out his rifle. But the dog takes no mind of the sheep—scrappy and lightfooted and black and white—is it a sheepdog, itself?

A little later, he enters Bobby’s study, exhausted from the day’s work and close enough to _dying_ for a warm fire to collapse himself in front of. But at shucking his boots off at the door, a lesson which Ellen has now long ingrained into his skull, Jo stepped over him with a basketful of strange, long ruddy-orange berries in her arms, and told him that Bobby wanted to speak with him.

So here he is; entering Bobby’s study, which as of yesterday is up one cuckoo, with a splintered beak. For Christ’s sake, just let the poor thing _die._

Except, entering the room, Dean’s thoughts are ripped from the frustrations of the day—Jo’s short tone with him, Sam’s refusal to stop babying the sheepdogs, Ellen’s coddling of Adam, Mr Singer’s freakish obsession with anything with a pair of wings on its back—

A man—who, Dean notes resentfully, has neglected to take _his_ boots off, and has trudged a pale gray slime of clay-rich mud through the room—stands at Bobby’s desk, too grand by far for a man as ill-educated and humble as Bobby.

A man who stands in a great black shaggy coat which reaches his knees, and a broad and battered hat which he only takes off at Dean’s entering, to reveal mussed hair as dark and roughed as the coat. A blue scarf is coiled loosely at his neck: the man is all rumpled layers, his shock of whiteblue eyes burn out from beneath his heavy brow. His jaw is stubbled with dark hair which betrays the time he’s been travelling as much as the battered pack, dropped onto the floor. A collie sits at the man’s feet, staring up at Dean with a gaze as wary and accusative as its owners, tufts of feathery coal ears pricked up.

The figure from the hills. The _mirthful_ figure from the hills.

Dean frowns at the figure just about the moment the other man must recognise him. Mirth slips back onto his features. Dean glowers.

“Dean,” Bobby says, sat at the chair behind the desk, “this is our new shepherd—”

“We don’t need one,” Dean shakes his head quickly, not looking at Bobby, continuing to glare at the stranger.

“Just so,” the stranger says, eyes flaring like lightning over the Atlantic. “It looked like it, today—you were headbutted, now, how many times by that ewe?”

His voice is rough and ragged as the cliffs. His pale lips curl lyrically around his words and make them sound simpler, more of the soil, than any language Dean has heard before. As if someone could plant letters and make them grow speech from the earth.

“Irish,” Dean says, and the lips twitch, though not in a smile. The stranger’s body moves minutely, only a shift in weight, but it makes the dog at his feet all but _frown_ at Dean.

“That’ll be me,” The wanderer confirms.

“You’ve met?” Bobby raises his eyebrows, piercing through the air of the interaction which is already thick with resentment and distrust.

“No,” Dean shakes his head, “he didn’t feel the need to introduce himself, when he passed me, earlier.”

“Seemed you had your hands full,” the traveller replies, and Dean’s jaw sets.

“I was handling it,” he says, grating the words out.

“Oh, handling it?” The stranger repeats. Dean takes a frustrated step forward, and the dog lets out a low growl, at which Dean all but jumps back.

Fine: he isn’t such a fan of dogs. He hasn’t been, since one of John’s friends drunkenly set several of his dogs on Dean, and all for a joke. And John just _laughed._

That had been soon after the happenings with Cassie. John had resented Dean for months after that, been all too happy to humiliate him and even see him hurt in his humiliation. Dean has to remind himself, even now, that it’s probably for the best John made them skip town. Who would’ve taken kindly to that romance, in a town like theirs? Better to protect Cassie, who would be the one who would get hurt by the men there; and by hurting her just a little, and leaving, Dean _did_ protect her.

His heart is sad for a moment until he spots the stranger’s amusement at Dean’s fear. But the traveller has at least steadied his dog. Dean glowers first at the man, then the dog, then Bobby.

“We don’t need a shepherd,” he repeats the sentiment. And definitely not _this_ one. Conceited and cold and speaking his words as though he has a secret.

“Yes we do, Dean,” Bobby sighs, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples. Dean scowls.

“No we don’t.”

“And why’s that?”

—The stranger asks this. Dean turns back to him.

“We have me,” he answers shortly.

“You’ve never cared for sheep before now,” Bobby answers, firm.

“Yes, but I’m a fast learner,” Dean grates out. “I’ve already—”

“This isn’t up for debate,” Bobby sighs. “We have a new shepherd. That’s final.”

“Perhaps you’ll let me teach you,” the stranger turns to Dean to say this, but Dean snarls his reply.

“And perhaps I’ll contract cholera.”

 _“Dean!”_ Bobby groans, but the shepherd— _damn_ it, the fucking shepherd—doesn’t seem bothered at all by the insult, in fact seems to find it a little weak. “I appreciate your determination, and I’ve told you already your work ethic is second to none. But you have nothing to prove, here. You’re a grower, a planter, a harvester. Mr Novak here is a shepherd. He comes from a long line of shepherds. All his family have kept sheep, for generations—”

“Then he can go back to them,” Dean spits.

The stranger—Novak’s—face remains steady.

“I can’t,” he says simply, and shakes his head.

“It’s my word, and it’s final,” Bobby states, eyes growing stormy. Dean glowers. “This is _still_ my farm, Dean.”

He wishes he’d stayed in Kansas. At least there, every farmer, every employer, would give him the chance to _prove_ himself, instead of—instead of hiring some stoic, arrogant vagrant to do a job he’s _perfectly_ capable of. Working was the only sense of belonging Dean _had_ in this place—Sam and Adam have found friends, a new family, people to talk to and turn to—and what does Dean have? He _had_ his sense of place in the necessity of the work he was doing, the fact that already, Bobby and all the household were relying on him. Not anymore. He misses the beating sun and flat expanses of his home, back when it felt as though he had grown roots into the earth just like everything he planted.

So far north, so far east, so far from where he has always felt belonging.

“Fine,” Dean bites. He’s about to turn sharply on his heel, but Bobby, clearly sensing the direction of his thoughts, speaks again to stop him.

“And you’ll show Mr Novak to his room, thank you.”

Dean turns back again, slowly.

“And where is Mr Novak to stay?” He asks sardonically.

“Why, the croft, of course,” Bobby frowns—and of course, the croft is the building closest to the sheep. Dean seeps with relief that Novak the Usurper will not be staying in the house, at least. The croft, a small building of stone and wood, a thatched roof and the wind fresh off the sea lashing onto it, is the perfect place for the traveller, aside from outside, or off the farm entirely.

“Alright,” Dean mutters, and glances to the Irishman. “You’d better follow me, then.”

“Just so.”

The shepherd thanks Bobby, offering a small and simple nod to substitute a bow, and follows after Dean. Down the hall in stubborn silence, the only sound their footsteps and the ticking of Novak’s thoughts, the swishing of Dean’s resentment inside his skull.

Dean shuffles his boots back on at the doorstep.

“Mr Singer… likes birds,” the shepherd offers by way of conversation while he waits for Dean to have his boots on. Dean glances up at him. The man’s face is a mask, steady, gaze sharp. His hat is back on.

“What gives you that impression?” Dean asks, and the shepherd tuts—whether with amusement, or frustration, Dean cannot tell. Boots on, he rises from the stone steps he’d been sat on, and ambles toward the sheep fields.

No words, again—perhaps Novak resents Dean as much as Dean resents him. He glances back at the man as they trudge up the steep green crest of a hill, slashes of mud torn in it from the feet of livestock like muddy wounds against the grass. Novak’s gaze is sturdy, on the horizon, sun glinting in his eyes. Thick creases around each corner of his eyes from years of squinting at the sun a set deeper as he watches it catching light against the sea. Dean starts when Novak flicks his gaze over to him.

He tears himself away, angrily.

“Mr Singer tells me he is your godfather,” the shepherd offers, and Dean doesn’t look back over to him.

“He is,” Dean confirms. They’re at the zenith of the hill; the sheep, their fields, and the croft nestled among them are all visible below.

“But it’s been some time since you last saw him,” the shepherd draws beside Dean, watching the land pan out around them. He has a slow way of moving, the way mountains must grow, sure and certain, something untapped and enduring within. No unnecessary steps, no unnecessary gestures, it could be graceful but for its stubborn minimalism.

“How could you tell?” Dean flashes a frown to the other man. He shrugs softly and makes no answer, stepping forward and descending the hill before Dean. Dean steps quickly to catch up with him. “How could you tell?” He repeats. The shepherd glances back to him. His gaze is like a lance. Dean is wordlessly accused of something as soon as it strikes him.

“You aren’t familiar,” the traveller say. _“You_ take liberties in politeness, as though you are.”

“What?” Dean frowns. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you are impolite,” Novak answers simply. The light is dipping swiftly below the cliffs, Dean will have to walk home in the dark, slipping and skidding on mud and sheep shit as he goes, and for what? To walk an ungrateful, rude, usurping and patchwork man to his shack, which he can surely make his way to, by now? And _who_ is this Novak, to talk of being impolite?

“You know,” Dean coughs stiffly, “whether you think I take liberties with him or not, I _will_ be inheriting this farm, and its hands, from Mister Singer.” When Novak says nothing, continues staring at the skyline, Dean clarifies, “And I’ll be able to fire, and hire, according to how well someone might work, or their attitude, or even how much I like them—”

“No, I understood what you were driving at, the first time,” the shepherd shakes his head, and Dean makes a frustrated noise in his throat.

“And yet, you didn’t apologise.”

“What for?” A ridge of a frown grows steadily between the man’s brows like a vine. “You seem hardly too fond of me, as it is. Were Mr Singer to pass tomorrow, or in a decade, I would count on losing your employment that same day.”

Dean grits his teeth and hurdles the gate they’ve come to stop at, perhaps making a bigger show of this than necessary. He wants to spite the shepherd, who seems a few years his senior, and prove that Dean is still in the throes of youth, while Novak has just slipped out of them.

But the shepherd only watches the spot Dean jumped over for a moment, head inclined like a strange inhuman creature, then, with every economy of movement, opens the gate and holds it a moment for his dog to slip through.

Dean grits his teeth.

“Yeah, well—the sooner you’re out of here, the better.”

“We must hope you’ll have learnt how to shepherd by then.”

The comment is wry. But Novak only frowns thoughtfully as he says it. Dean spits at the ground and clambers over a sty into what is, fortunately, their final field to cross. Novak’s dog clears it without any problem, bounding on ahead. The wind whistles through the grass.

“The door doesn’t lock,” Dean says, hoping that this will put the shepherd off some, as they draw near the croft. “And the windows are something terribly thin.”

“I’ve no fear of thieves,” Novak offers, shrugging so small it’s like the fragments of movement offered by Bobby’s birds as they flitter about the wire bars of their cages. “I’ve little to my name, and still less worth stealing.”

“And what of the cold?” Dean raises an eyebrow.

“It has a fireplace?” The shepherd asks. Dean confirms. “Aye, it’ll do nicely. A roof is more than I’ve been used to, these past months.”

Dean grows exasperated. They’re at the croft, now.

“There’s a forge, there,” Dean gestures to the even smaller building to the side of the one they stand at, as he unlatches the door to Novak’s new dwelling. “Though I doubt that’s any use to you—”

“I make my own tools,” the shepherd shakes his head, stepping through the door before Dean has a chance to, himself. Dean scowls. He follows into the building after the shepherd. The air in it is icy, like cold stone—somehow colder than outside. Dean clasps his hands and rubs them together—Novak glances back at the gesture.

“Used to warmer climes?” He asks, and trills of defensiveness run through Dean’s chest.

“You’re not?”

“I grew up with the Atlantic at my doorstep,” the shepherd answers wryly. He drops his bag onto the kitchen table. It’s only the one room—a simple bedframe rests in the corner, a tarnished basin for washing against the wall. “Have you any straw?” He asks, turning to Dean after scanning the contents of the room from its centre for a few moments.

“You—you have a bed, right there,” Dean points to the cot. The shepherd gives him a look.

“For the dog,” he says, and Dean flushes.

“Right—”

“And though you, being the heir of some great grand house might find this hard to believe, there’ve indeed been nights where I’ve slept among the straw and hay.”

“No,” Dean frowns again, “I don’t find it hard to believe. And I have, too—so it’s not—not like that. And it’s not a great _or_ grand house—”

The shepherd smirks.

Dean straightens up.

“Don’t act like I’m so far above you,” he frowns, but Novak cocks his head.

“But isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do?” The shepherd raises his eyebrows. Dean’s insides harden with frustrated.

“I’m not some entitled child, landed into good fortune.”

“No?”

“I’m not!”

“Describe how you came to be on this farm.”

Dean clamps his jaw shut. The farmer watches him.

“As I thought.”

“No, it’s only that I hardly owe an explanation of myself to some—some—vagrant shepherd, farm hand—”

“Is vagrant farm hand not exactly what you were, save until a few months gone?” Novak asks, innocently. Dean stops. “Mr Singer told me,” he says, to answer Dean’s confusion. “So you may save your explanations. As for your insults, I rather suspect they’ll act as spitting against the wind.”

“If it’s straw you’d like,” Dean decides to press forward—if he debates with the shepherd further, he’ll only be here _longer,_ “there’s some in the barn in the next field gone. I won’t be fetching that for you.”

The shepherd tips his hat to Dean.

“I’ll be up with the dawn,” he states. “If you’d _like_ to learn how to handle the sheep, I’ll see you with the sun.”

Dean grinds his teeth and stares at the shepherd. The shepherd stares back, unfazed, his wild electric shock of eyes the only thing modernising his strange pastoral features.

“We’ll see,” Dean replies, heart thumping angrily. _Who_ is this arrogant traveller to assume he has so much to teach Dean? _Dean,_ who fed his family for years by the hard labour he performed on farm after farm, sweat stinging his skin, running down his temples, turning to salt as the sun seared it from his skin? Blistering hands from tilling hard, cracked, uncooperative soil—Dean, after the wrenches of those years, surely proved himself capable?

“Just so,” the shepherd says, crackle in his eyes changing, now, the fizzing of lightning in clouds before it flashes down to earth, a rumination.

Dean hardly knows what to say, now. So he turns and leaves.

The sun has dipped beyond the sighing sea as he exits the cabin. The sky is a deep and dusty purple, the waters shimmer in what faint light there is. Around him, a few sheep let out anxious bleating calls over the long dappled grass. Fishing boats sail in from the horizon now that the sun has sunk below the waters: the day is done. Follow that bright star west, and Dean would end up home.

If only he were a sailor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be up soon. Please comment/tell your friends about this story/otherwise offer me some dopamine. Bless up x


	3. Jackdaw

It’s a fitful sleep, with shades of blue prickling around him and pressing in on him. The sun slips up past his windowframe and he awakes with a long breath in, eyes fluttering, before remembering where he is. Not in the Atlantic. Not in pressing, bulshy waves. No lightning over the waters.

He starts, remembering Novak’s offer to teach him how to shepherd. Should he take it? The man is insufferable, smug, unreadable as the mist—and why would he want to teach Dean how to herd and tend to sheep, when he knows full well Dean will simply fire him, when he’s finished learning?

He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go and spend a full day with a man who finds obvious entertainment in infuriating Dean. Really, he ought to stick to Bobby’s advice, and stick to the soil. It’s what he knows, after all. He beats the question back and forth in his head, worrying, worrying, berating himself for the pride sacrificed in each answer—until Sam enters his room just as he’s finished dressing, and tells him that one of the grain silos has broken and is leaking, everywhere.

Dean’s question is answered. He spends the first half of his day clearing and mending after the silo accident. He was so relieved to have the necessity of work laid out for him, ensuring _he_ didn’t have to decide whether or not to take Novak up on his offer of mentorship, that he completely forgot to take breakfast. Now, the sun pointed proud and high in the sky, the silo repaired, cold sweat prickling his brow, Dean remembers. His stomach growls at him. Hopefully Ellen has prepared something good, he thinks, trudging back toward the farmhouse.

Inside, chatter and laughter bubbles from the kitchen, and something sweet is on the air, like the scent of hibiscus but… deeper. Dean follows it, growing hungrier with every step, the idea of something sweet and warm sitting heavy in his stomach particularly relieving, until at the bending doorframe of the kitchen he can make out the source of the sound, and fizzes with anger at it.

“I haven’t had rosehip jam in _years,”_ Novak shakes his head, his voice warm and rough. His boots are still on, he’s traipsed mud into the kitchen, and yet Ellen _still_ beams at him as he speaks. They’re straining the red, pointed berries Dean saw Jo carrying in yesterday through a muslin cloth. The berries have been cooked in water and turn to mulch in the cloth.

“You get first try of it,” Ellen smiles warmly, ladling more of the cooked berries into the muslin strainer. “Getting rid of these seeds is always such a _chore._ Thank you for helping out with it.”

“Always worth it for the jam, wouldn’t you say,” Novak asks. In spite of the wildness, ruggedness of his dress, manner and features, seeing him in the domestic is… strangely touching. The delicacy of his features is brought out, the calm inquisitive slope of his brow, the fine-focussed point of his nose. Where he certainly didn’t fit in between the austere walls of Bobby’s study, he certainly does in the farmhouse kitchen.

“Oh, absolutely,” Ellen laughs. “You’re going to be _very_ popular with Adam. That boy’s got a serious sweet-tooth.”

She spots Dean frowning at the doorway.

“Well now, look who’s back—it’s our silo surgeon.”

Dean says nothing, stepping into the kitchen, casting Novak a resentful look.

“Missed you out today, with the sheep,” the shepherd says, and Dean almost stops short.

Is ‘missed’ _really_ the right word? Doubtless, Novak is mocking him.

“I was—I was fixing a grain silo,” Dean answers, defensively. “I couldn’t.”

“Another time,” the shepherd answers simply, eyes trained on Dean. Dean trembles with resentment.

“Are you hungry?” Ellen asks. “Didn’t catch you at breakfast.”

“I was fixing the silo,” Dean answers again, flicking his gaze onto her. He can feel Novak’s pressing at him, still. All of it riles offense in him. Even the man’s damn _dog_ is in the room, lying down beside the back door to the courtyard, head on its paws, watching the world with intrigued, though peaceful, eyes. How’s Novak gotten away with this?

“Well, lunch is nearly ready,” Ellen says. “And Mr Novak will be joining us.”

“What a joy,” Dean mutters, sitting at one of the long benches drawn up to the kitchen table.

“Are you not to help your mother out with it?” The shepherd asks, eyebrows raised, voice rough with indignant surprise. Dean’s head shoots up, from where he’d been resting it on his fist.

“She’s not my mother,” he bites out. The shepherd blinks.

“Oh—my apologies—what with you both being from—”

Ellen smiles and laughs.

“Just a coincidence,” she answers.

“You must admit,” the shepherd says thoughtfully, looking from Dean to Ellen, “there is some kind of resemblance.”

Dean frowns. He can’t see it.

“Perhaps there is,” Ellen says, and glances at Dean. “What do you think?”

Dean shrugs. And, because he feels spiteful and would like to make this awkward, he says,

 _“My_ mother is dead.”

Ellen presses her lips together and turns back to the berries straining through the muslin. Her back to him, Dean can still make out the terseness of her muscles at Dean’s somewhat pointed rejection.

“You have my condolences,” Novak glances, concerned, from Ellen to Dean. “As is mine. You’re in good company.”

Is Mr Novak _really_ the definition of good company? Is sitting in the company of another with a deceased parent really what one might call ‘good’ company?

“And what of your father?” Dean asks. A mask slides over the shepherd’s features, the feeling it stirs in Dean is like being choked.

“Long dead,” he says, voice quieter, and flat. “All dead.”

Silence. Novak turns back to Ellen to help her with the berries, which are strained twice, three times more.

“Perhaps we oughtn’t tell the young Mr Winchester about this,” he says conspiratorially to Ellen, “but the hairs on the seeds may be used as an itching powder. Nothing more irritating, I believe.”

Dean could name a few things.

Ellen titters.

“Oh, he’s a good boy—wouldn’t _think_ of using it, I’m sure.”

“What about this one?” Novak gestures to Dean, who bristles.

“I’ve no idea,” Ellen admits, eyes warm as she glances to Dean. “Too old now, but perhaps when he was a boy…”

“Well, Mr Winchester?” Novak asks, and it’s _strange_ to hear the name on his lips, though Dean can’t think why. “Were you a wild, misbehaving child?”

Dean’s lip turns down, half resentment, half sadness.

“I never was.”

“Never was?”

“I never was a child.”

Ellen tuts at the impossibility of this statement. But Novak’s eyes are turned sadly on Dean. Dean can only hold his gaze for a moment, before he flits his away, swallowing. He dislikes the understanding rinsing the shepherd’s features.

Bread is pulled from the oven and set aside to cool as Novak and Ellen spoon jam into heated jars. The kitchen smells like sunlight. Adam enters with a grazed knee and a broad grin, Novak frowns at the knee for a moment before catching the boy’s expression and easing.

“Scrape?” He asks, gesturing to the knee.

“I’ve been climbing in the orchard,” Adam says, which explains the powdery smears of lichen and dried moss on his hands and face. Dean comments on these, but Ellen tuts.

“Let the child be a child,” she says, and again, Dean’s insides simmer bitterly. Novak watches him with his mask-like expression.

Sam enters and enquires after the silo, before helping Ellen set the table. Dean moves his arms for Sam to put a plate in front of him.

Novak continues watching him. Dean bristles. What, is it because he isn’t helping Ellen prepare lunch? _He’s_ been at work, too. Unlike Novak, apparently—the man has been lounging about in the kitchen, gossiping and making jam. Well, maybe not gossiping. The shepherd barely speaks at all: he’d hardly be a good partner for it.

They sit down for lunch—only Sam, Adam, Ellen, Dean, and the shepherd. Mick is out escorting Bobby to the solicitors, Jo is out running errands. Novak sits opposite Dean. Dean stares sullenly down at the table—lunch is smoked fish, fresh from the sea, greens, and the bread which has just been pulled from the stove. Dean thinks sadly of the stretches of time he spent on Sundays and Holy Days, sat at the lakes of his old state, fishing. Waiting and reeling in a soft circle of motion and stasis until the fear and anger in his heart had dimmed to nothing more than quiet ember. He remembers the happy look on Sam’s face when he would come back with enough to feed them for a week, and _good_ meals, too.

How the tides of life came rushing in.

They eat: Sam barrels questions at the shepherd about his life, and Ireland, which the man is very good at answering without divulging any kind of information whatsoever. Dean comes out of the meal knowing no more about the shepherd than when he went in—and all he’s learnt, rings in his head like the tolling of a funeral bell.

_Long dead. All dead._

Dean, about to leave the kitchen, is called back by the shepherd.

“No sheep herding lessons today, then?”

“I need to get on with the rest of my work,” Dean answers. And perhaps this is true, but not desperately so: his work for today hadn’t been so pressing that this morning, he’d felt there was no option but to forge on with it. No, this morning he _wrestled_ with the idea of seeing Novak. If it had been so certain, there would be no wrestling at all.

“Just so,” the shepherd says. Dean leaves the kitchen, fists balled, as Novak thanks Ellen for the meal, and she offers him a now-cooled jar of the ruddy-gold rosehip jam.

The next day, he also decides against joining Novak. Bobby has hired some new men, two of whom, Victor Henriksen, and Benny Lafitte, Dean finds he doesn’t dislike and can stand to spend the day in hard labour with. He takes them up on their offer of drinking at the pub in town, and has to drunkenly stumble home alone—Lafitte and Henriksen opt to stay and chatter, but Dean is to be up early the next morning to take Bobby into town. He wanders along the cliffs from town, wind whipping about his hair. Perhaps this is unwise—several times he wobbles in the force of the gale fresh off the sea, and he steps aren’t exactly _steady,_ and the land is uneven from years of the steady erosion of livestock treading over it, and the night is dark and his only light is the moon and stars and odd ships on the horizon…

Beer seems stronger in England.

Or perhaps the English drink more?

Or perhaps it was the songs they sang—the whole pub riled up in a rendition of a song named _Farewell, Nancy,_ which Dean had not known, but picked up soon enough. Drinking seems easier when drenched in singing.

 _“In the deepest of danger,”_ he hums, and stumbles as he hums, _“I shall stand your friend—”_

He trips. He trips, and trying to catch himself, instead catches his hand on a bluegrayblack and jagged rock. A _bastard_ jagged rock. He hisses in pain.

_“Fuck,”_

“Well now,” in the darkness, a figure stands over him, but Dean would recognise the voice in a crowded and murmuring room. He groans, already infuriated. “You’ve gone from singing sailor’s love songs to cursing like one. I know which I prefer.”

“Fuck you,” Dean spits up at the figure, before examining his hand, swimming with blood dimmed by the smear of the relentless damp of English mud. _Damn it._

“And still now, I like that even less,” the shepherd says. His dog sniffs, a few feet away, in the tentative direction of Dean’s hand. Obviously his blood has caught on the air. Novak squats down to see Dean’s hand—Dean tries to rip his fingers away when the shepherd takes hold of them, but the man’s grip is firm, and Dean is uncoordinated, and the effort rips the wound further. Dean lets out a small cry. In the glint of moonlight off the sea, Novak gives him a look.

“Shut up,” Dean growls, but the man cocks his head.

“I said nothing.”

“Very in-character of you.”

“Would words undo the damage you’ve done to yourself?” The shepherd raises his eyebrows. Dean bites his tongue a moment.

“What’re you doing out here?”

“I _was_ looking for Mugwort. I saw you coming, and stumbling, and thought you might need a hand. Before I could give you one, you’d fallen.”

“Mugwort?” Dean repeats.

“Aye.”

“Who’s that?”

The shepherd chuckles. It’s the first time Dean has seen him laugh, and of _course_ it’s directed at mocking him.

 _“It_ is a herb,” he answers. And because the man is so set upon mocking Dean, Dean decides to return the favour.

“Funny time to be picking herbs,” he states. The shepherd’s expression twitches in the pure moonlight.

“She’s strongest under the moon.”

Dean frowns. The man is a strange and wild thing, and apparently something witchy, too.

“Huh?”

“Mugwort. She’s ruled by the moon. Strongest by her light.”

Dean shakes his head.

“Right.” Of course. What else? Bobby and his birds, Jo and her reckless impulsivity, and apparently Mr Novak and his superstitions… is _everyone_ at the Eyrie either insane, or at least headed toward it?

The dog treads forward lightly, still sniffing at the air. Dean frowns at it, the shepherd stills it with a word.

“Can you walk?” Novak asks, and Dean glares up at him.

“I’m not _that_ drunk.”

“I meant no offense,” the shepherd sighs, “only that you might have hurt more than just your hand, on the fall.”

“I’m fine,” Dean shakes his head, and struggles up. Perhaps not—his foot definitely _feels_ sprained from the fall and sharp twist it took. Great.

Novak is at his side when he limps, hands patronisingly ready for Dean to fall.

“I’m _fine,”_ Dean repeats.

“Let me see to your hand,” Novak says, voice like soft grass but also the soil under it. _Wow,_ Dean is drunk.

He holds out his hand to the shepherd.

“Well,” he says, “hard to tell in this light. Looks like the rock’s splintered into your hand, though.”

“Damn it,” Dean groans.

“Nothing I can’t help,” the shepherd says. Dean doubts it. “My house is just here,” he gestures with his head to the small, ancient building while he rubs his thumbs down the length of Dean’s fingers. “Come.”

And what choice does Dean have? He follows.


	4. Linnet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this is something a little happier after last night's shit show (rip). Enjoy x

Inside the croft, Novak has hung dried herbs about from the beams spanning the rafters. It’s just as Ellen does, only more, far more, than Dean has yet seen—inside Ellen’s kitchen, or anywhere. He can’t identify all of them, some are strange, wild, prehistoric looking things. Novak ranges in, dropping a small cloth bag onto the table. He hangs a blackened kettle over the hook at the fireplace, and pulls out a chair at the table, then pulls out another beside it for himself, and sits.

“Come,” he says again. “Sit.”

Dean does so, limping forward. The dog pushes softly past him and sits at the shepherd’s feet. It watches Dean as he approaches.

As he sits down, Novak has taken a hold of his hand. With his other, he draws the candle at the table closer, and frowns down at Dean’s injury.

“Yes,” he says, “I thought so.”

“Huh?” Dean blinks.

“The rock has splintered,” the shepherd looks up at him. “I cannot pick out all its pieces.”

“Well what good are you, then?” Dean glares. The shepherd stands.

“It’s slate,” he says, “that’s the danger, of course.”

“What?”

“The danger. Brittle. It splinters.”

“Ah, well my mistake,” Dean bites. “Next time, I’ll be sure to fall on a softer rock, like chalk. Or something sturdy? What about granite?”

“Next time it would be better if you didn’t fall at all,” the shepherd shakes his head. Dean snarls.

“Next time, I won’t take you up on your offer of help.”

“Let’s hope, then, you don’t need it,” the shepherd assents. He takes down a pot from a shelf and pulls out some small leaves, resembling spinach, but with light stringy fibres running through them. He picks up the kettle and pours a little of its water onto a cloth. Sitting back down, checks the temperature of the water from the kettle, then rinses Dean’s hand with it. It’s hot, but not yet too hot, and once he has done this, the shepherd mops softly at the wound with the cloth until it is clear of the mud and larger pieces of slate. He rises again, returns the kettle to heat over the fire, and picks up a few of the leaves, chewing on them.

“Now’s hardly the time for dinner,” Dean frowns, but the shepherd simply rolls his eyes and spits the paste of leaves into his hand, reaching out to smear it over Dean’s own.

“Jesus!” Dean shouts, ripping his hand away, so loud and sudden the dog starts up.

“Easy,” Novak soothes, but whether he directs this to the dog, or to Dean, he cannot tell.

“What’re you doing?”

“This’ll keep away infection,” the shepherd answers, nodding to the paste of plant and spittle in his hand, and Dean’s lip curls. _Really._ “And draw out the pieces in the cut that aren’t _hand.”_

“What?”

“The slate, Mr Winchester. It’ll rid you of the slate, cutting into you.”

Dean is unconvinced. It must show: the shepherd sighs and shifts forward in his chair.

“It gives me no great pleasure, Sir, but it is the best way.”

“But there’s another way?” Dean asks, still unconvinced.

“Digging around in your hand with a sharp pair of tweezers,” Novak answers frankly. “Or let the slate sit, and stay, and rub and cut and grate at your poor tender nerves from inside of you until your last breath.”

Dean doesn’t like any of these options. But then, he reasons, what’s a little spit? It never _hurt_ anyone. In the time of the fuss he’s kicked up, more blood, watery from the rinse his hand was given, has trickled down to his fingers. He sighs and sits back down.

“Fine,” and he shoves his hand forward again.

Novak has to mop away at the blood again before applying the paste.

His hands move with surprising gentleness over Dean’s. He smooths the paste over the wound—it does, Dean will admit, have a strangely numbing effect, though maybe that’s simply because he’s _expecting_ it—with soft and focussed motions, gaze set on what he does like a dart thrown, never veering. _Dean_ is not so focussed—his eyes slip from the paste smoothed over his palm to Novak’s hands, the roughened, graceful fingers, the wind chapped and defined ridges of his knuckles, down to his wrists which turn with motion as he works. Then to Novak’s gaze. Steady, intent, intense. A strange wise wild beast of a man.

“Now,” Novak says, and takes a new cloth and binds Dean’s hand tight, “take this off tomorrow evening.”

“But I’m going to the bank tomorrow morning, with Bobby.”

“Good for you.”

“No,” Dean bites, “I mean, I can’t wander in with a leaf and spittle covered bandage—”

“Well, Mr Winchester, that sounds like a problem of pride.”

Dean grits his teeth.

“Now,” Novak says, rising, picking up the muddied cloth and tossing it into a basket on the floor, and taking a small tin pot from the little table beside his bed, “you’re lucky I have some of this left.” He approaches Dean again, sitting. “Give me your foot,” he says, and Dean balks.

“Sorry, what?”

“Take your boots off, and give me your foot,” Novak repeats, with longsuffering grace. “You’ve obviously sprained something.”

Dean sighs and acquiesces, slipping his boot off and lifting his foot, minus boot, awkwardly.

“Where…” he murmurs, but the shepherd, expression steady yet something in his gaze betraying annoyance, takes a hold of Dean’s leg and rests the foot on his lap. He pulls off Dean’s battered sock, and Dean flushes, strangely worried that after a long day’s work, he might smell, and concerned of what the shepherd will think of him.

Novak runs strong, steady fingers against the agitated knot of muscle.

“Yes, a sprain,” he says. He unscrews the pot and swathes some of its contents onto his finger. The colour of beeswax, though slightly runnier, Dean frowns at the mixture. “Balm,” Novak explains to Dean’s quizzical look. “Made from the leaves of the elder.”

“Oh,” is all Dean can think to say, both at the explanation and the smooth sensation of the shepherd rubbing the balm into his swollen skin. He looks from his foot up to the shepherd’s face. The shepherd continues looking down, rubbing the balm in, but something flickers in his countenance that lets Dean know Novak can feel Dean’s gaze upon him. Dean continues looking.

A stretch of silence and watching like the Great Plains of Dean’s home.

Dean doesn’t cease his watching. The shepherd is like some strange ethereal thing. Not of this world. Watching him work must be how Moses felt at the burning bush. The shepherd takes a strip of linen and binds it around Dean’s ankle tight, supporting his foot.

“There,” Novak says, when he’s finished. “You ought to keep that elevated. And try not to use it.”

“But I’m—”

“Heading to town, with Mr Singer, tomorrow,” the shepherd finishes for him. “I know.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Dean asks, prickles of annoyance flicking at his gut.

“Get your brother to go, instead of you?” Novak suggests with a shrug. “Or go, and limp through it. You’ll live, either way.”

Dean grumbles.

“You need to work on your bedside manner, there, Doc.”

“I never get any complaints from my sheep,” the shepherd takes Dean’s foot from his lap and moves it to rest up on the table, elevated, like he said. He rises, approaches the fire. Dean watches from his seat. Novak’s eyes glint in the firelight as he picks up the kettle again, now steaming merrily, and pours himself a cup of something from one of the many pots lining his shelves. “How’s the pain?” He asks. Dean shrugs. Novak takes out a small vial from one of the pockets of his coat, fills another cup with boiled water, and tips some of the vial contents into it. He spoons some honey, and stirs. Handing it to Dean, he says, “this’ll help.”

“You’ve settled in well,” Dean comments, nodding to the pots and well stocked shelves.

“Yes,” Novak agrees. He sits back down. Dean confuses himself by nearly returning his foot to Novak’s lap. He catches himself, shaking his head minutely at the strange intuitive act he almost performed.

When the shepherd doesn’t say anything more, Dean points out,

“You moved in yesterday.”

“I’m aware.”

Dean sighs. Novak’s gaze flicks back up to him. He pushes the cup closer to Dean.

“Drink,” he says. When Dean sighs and does so, he elaborates. “Mrs Harvelle gave me some assistance, and furnishings, this afternoon. And her daughter gifted me some essentials from town,” he gestures to one of the shelves, with salt, garlic, the jar of honey. “As you can see. The last shepherd left some of his things, the hurry he was in. I’ve laid claim to them.”

“Oh.”

“You knew him?”

“Never,” Dean shakes his head. “He left just before my arrival.”

“I see.”

“An elopement.”

“I heard.”

“Do shepherds make a habit of that?” Dean asks. Novak cocks his head.

“Does that thought worry you?” He asks.

“No, I’m hoping you’ll run off, too.”

“Ah.”

Silence. Dean takes another sip of his drink. It’s faintly flowery—is that the honey? No, the honey is headier than this taste; something light and floral accompanies the sugared flavour. The dog settles, lying down at Novak’s feet, letting out a long, soft, animal sigh from its nose. It looks up at Dean. It seems less wary of him, than before.

“Primrose,” the shepherd gestures to the drink, reading Dean’s thoughtful expression. “It’s primrose oil, in there.”

“Oh,” Dean says. Yes, that makes sense.

The room glows orange in the light of the fire. It hits the side of Novak’s face and creeps along its ridges, something like the opening of a sunflower in the sight.

The night is dark beyond the thin-paned windows.

Silence as they look at each other. What kind of resentment, Dean wonders, must the shepherd feel for him, considering all Dean’s barbed comments and cold treatment?

“Mr Singer has… a lot of birds,” the shepherd says. Dean blinks.

“Yes,” he nods.

“Why is that?”

Dean shrugs. He glances down at Novak’s hands, which cradle his own drink, dark green flecks floating through it.

“What’s that?” He asks.

“Lemon Balm,” the shepherd answers. “For sleep.”

“You find it hard to sleep?” Dean asks.

The shepherd draws in a breath.

“Occasionally…”

“Me too,” Dean says.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Since his wife and son passed, Bobby began nursing whatever injured birds he could find.”

The shepherd blinks.

“Sorry?”

“Bobby. The birds. That’s why he keeps the birds. I think.”

“Oh. He hasn’t said that, though?”

“No,” Dean admits.

“And nobody else has told you?”

“I worked it out. At least—” Dean falters. “Well, I think I did.”

“It sounds feasible.”

“No more ridiculous than a man keeping and caring and tending to so many birds, in the first place.”

“We are all fools, in grief.”

Dean glances up from his drink, at these words.

“Yes,” he agrees. He thinks of his father moving restlessly from town to town, ceasing to work or provide for his family, drinking until his speech was perpetually slurred and he, at least twice a month, pissed himself. Better in his bed than the streets and public places, where Dean’s face would burn with humiliation as he carried his stumbling father to wherever ‘home’ was, each time. He thinks of Adam making strange little talismans of each of them, after John and his own mother’s death, and how he would line them up and count them, over and over, each night before sleep. He thinks of himself, and the vice that closed over him after watching his mother—

He thinks of Mr Novak, the shepherd, and what he said, this morning.

_All dead. Long dead._

Another Great Plains stretch of silence. The shepherd looks down at his drink, taking long, low sips from it.

The shepherd starts humming. His voice might be the saddest and loneliest thing in the universe. He starts humming, and Dean is so distracted by the shale quality of his singing and distant look in his eye that he almost doesn’t recognise the song as the one Dean was singing to himself when he fell.

_In the deepest of danger,  
I shall stand your friend;  
In the cold stormy weather,  
When the winds are a blowing;  
My dear, I shall be willing  
To wait on you then._

Dean sings along too. The moment hangs in eerie silence around them save for the hum of their voices. Novak stares at a spot just to the right of Dean, but in a moment, his gaze flickers back over to Dean’s face.

“Are you alright for getting home?” He asks, and Dean blinks.

“Sorry?”

“On that ankle of yours,” the shepherd clarifies. “Are you okay for getting home?”

“Oh,” Dean says, and realises that this is a hint for him to take his leave. Mild offense simmers through him—why is Novak suddenly being so inhospitable? The man is rough and antisocial. “Yes. I’ll—” he takes his foot down from the table. “—Take my leave,” he rises, winces at the pressure on his ankle, but nonetheless limps toward the door. “Sorry, for taking up so much of your time—”

The shepherd sighs behind him and stands, pushing his chair back.

“Here, young master,” he says. “Let me.”

He opens the door for Dean, who steps through it, ready to make the turbulent journey back home—and so is surprised by the shepherd taking his arm and closing the door behind them—not before the dog slips out to walk through the darkness with the pair.

Now, Dean feels patronised, a disgruntled defensiveness coiling through him.

“I can make it myself—”

“Aye, but if you slip and fall again in the darkness, all the blame shall be on me.”

“No, it wouldn’t—”

“And I make no pretensions, Mr Winchester: I don’t count on keeping my job, long, with you around. But I’ll not be fired by _Mr Singer,_ on my second night in.”

“So it’s all for your own self-preservation, is it?” Dean asks, irritated, and unimpressed. The air is cold around them, the stars distant and watchful. Clouds like smoke drift slowly across the vast surface of the sky.

“Just so.”

Dean grinds his teeth. The grass is wet, up to his shins, makes his clothing damp.

“You’ll grind them down to stumps, you carry on that way,” Novak warns.

Dean wants to push the shepherd away angrily, but there comes a sudden grassy gulf, which he stumbles and nearly falls at, and so ends up leaning more heavily on Novak than ever, while the shepherd holds tight and hoists him back up with arms like oak branches.

Balance regained, Dean’s face burns with humiliation.

“I’m not young, by the way,” Dean finds himself grating out sullenly. In the darkness, the farmer pulls an inquisitive expression. “You called me ‘young master’, back there. I’m not young.”

“I’m sorry,” Novak cocks his head. “Would ‘old codger’ serve you better, next time?”

Dean growls.

“For some unknowable reason, everyone in the farmhouse likes you. I want you to know, I don’t buy it, I don’t see it. I _do_ see you flattering and grovelling—and it’s not impressive, nor subtle—”

“I neither flatter, nor grovel,” the shepherd frowns. “How old did you say you were?”

“What?”

“How old did you say you were?” The shepherd repeats.

“In January, I’ll turn twenty-five.”

“I see,” Novak frowns thoughtfully. “Well, you _are_ older than I thought.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Behave like a sullen child, and that’s how you’ll be perceived.”

Dean shoves the shepherd, but it only has the effect of pushing him out of the man’s strong grip and toppling Dean over onto the grass. He makes and infuriated sound from the earth, scrambling at the earth.

“Do you want a hand?” The shepherd asks flatly above him. Dean nearly snarls.

“You’re so patronising!”

“So you don’t?”

Dean wrestles himself back onto his feet—or, foot, rather. Looking back up at Novak’s soft, even expression, he sighs.

“Would you give me your arm again?” He asks. Novak exhales and the sound is like summer wind through wheat.

The shepherd comes back to his side, and helps him walk, again.

“What about you?” Dean asks. A quizzical expression. “How old are you?” Dean elaborates.

“Oh,” the shepherd says. “I have seen almost thirty springs.”

“And no sweethearts?” Dean finds himself asking. The shepherd frowns, confused. “No-one waiting for you, back home? No-one who asked you, pleaded with you, not to leave, none writing you letters, no sweet young Irish lady hoping to call you husband, and to call you that, soon?”

Novak shakes his head.

“It’s all gone,” is all he says. Dean frowns again. “All gone.”

Silence. The sound of Dean’s awkward footsteps over the slopes, and the shepherd’s steady ones.

“Sírecht,” the shepherd says, and Dean frowns.

“Si-what?”

“Sírecht is the word for that. Old Irish. A home longed for, which you cannot return to.”

“Sírecht,” Dean repeats, and he thinks of the wandering flats of Kansas and the golden sun.

“Gone,” the shepherd says again, eternal sadness in the word. “All gone.”

The air around them is light and crystalline. The stars smile down sadly, little pinpricks in the broken vessel of the sky, through which shines some sorrowful heavenly light.

Neither speak.

The farmhouse grows bigger as they approach. A few lights—Sam’s, he’s probably reading—and the light from Bobby’s study. After Novak assists him up the steps, Dean pushes open the front door, and they make their way inside.

“Which room is yours?” Novak asks. Dean blinks.

“What?”

The shepherd sighs longsufferingly.

“Am I to take you upstairs, or can you manage that yourself?”

Dean breathes in for a moment, thinking. The shepherd’s body pulses steady heat against his own while his brain ticks over like a machine cooling down. The night air was cold; Dean’s hands are cold, but he’d quite forgotten it with the warmth of the shepherd against him. Maybe all the strange, folksy herbal crap the guy practices actually does some good—Novak’s circulation must be—

“Mr Winchester,” the man frowns, and Dean blinks back to himself.

“It’s upstairs,” he says, and then, “would you help me?”

“Just so,” the man assents.

“Dean,” a voice calls—Bobby—from his study. “What’re you doing out there?”

“Mr Winchester took a tumble by the cliffs—” The shepherd calls back in answer, and a noise of alarm comes from the study.

“Damn—” the sound of Bobby fumbling frantically for his canes, before Novak calls again.

“—Though it’s nothing to worry for, Mr Singer, it was only a small topple, and I’ve seen to his wounds—”

“His _wounds?”_ Bobby repeats, and one of the canes clatters on the floor from his study, and Bobby curses within. “Damn it—”

“Mr Singer, we’ll come to you,” the shepherd offers, and guides Dean through to the doorway of the study. Bobby is fumbling from his chair for the cane on the floor, and looking up, seeing Dean in one piece, sighs, exasperated.

“Damn it, boy,” he shakes his head, “how much did you have to drink?!”

“Less than your new farmhands,” Dean states defensively, _“and_ less than you, on any given weeknight.”

“Well, some of us can hold it,” Bobby grumbles. Something in Dean’s heart prickles—was—was Bobby _concerned_ for him?

That’s unexpected. John would barely notice whenever Dean hurt himself, even when it was through doing things nobler by far than drinking. Dean recalls, with a salt-stinging sadness, when age fifteen his arm was caught in a machine and broke in two places. John had only scowled at Dean’s splint and bandaged arm and said, _how long will that take to mend?_ Dean’s answer of two months had been met by a shout, and the sound of John’s bottle being thrown against the wall, and the alcohol-burn of his breath at Dean’s nostrils as he’d exclaimed, too close for comfort, _and how are we meant to eat until then?!_

Dean’s answer at this point, _Why don’t you feed us, father?_ Had been answered with a vice grip around his other arm and the wordless threat of breaking this one, too.

The pain had been so great, that night, that Dean had stolen some of John’s whiskey and drank it, all of it, in one, two, three gulps. He’d face the consequences the next morning: of course John would notice. And he did. And he did.

“I’m seeing Dean up to his room,” the shepherd explains, and Dean flickers back to the present, and Bobby is staring at Dean like he just asked him a question, but Dean was too far off, treading the walkways of the past, to answer it. “He’ll be right by morning, I suspect, Mr Singer. I gave him some balm for his ankle.”

“Thank you,” Bobby says, drawing in a breath. “I’m glad to see the two of you are getting along,” he says, at which bitter wine seeps into Dean’s veins and his lip curls.

“We’re not,” he says, glaring.

“Oh,” Bobby frowns.

“He just walked me back. That’s all.”

“Right,” Bobby shakes his head, and returns to his papers. “I’ll see you, bright and early tomorrow, Dean. I hope you won’t be hungover.”

It’s not a well-wish, it’s an instruction to recover. Dean sighs.

“C’mon,” he mutters, and tugs at Novak, who helps him out of the room.

Up the creaking staircase, through to Dean’s bedroom. It’s dark inside; Novak takes a match from his pocket and strikes it against the stubble scratching at the hard line of his jaw. Dean blinks, impressed, when it lights. The shepherd doesn’t notice. He brings the flaring flame to the candle and lights it.

Lifting it and looking around the room, he states,

“Now, you’ve barely furnished this place.”

Dean frowns defensively.

“I have little to furnish it with.”

“I see.” Novak turns to face Dean, who rests his weight on his good ankle. “And would you like anything?” He asks. “To make it feel more like home?”

Dean frowns, heart twitching, though not only with homesickness.

“I—it isn’t home,” he says, and says it firmly. “This isn’t my home. So why should I need anything?”

The shepherd sighs.

“I see,” he says again. “Well. Goodnight, Mr Winchester. I hope you recover well.”

“I’ll return the bandage to you, tomorrow—”

“Don’t think on that,” the shepherd shrugs. “It’s no great thing of importance.”

Dean, remembering the size of Novak’s pack and the few earthly belongings he must own—most of which seem to be herbs, anyway—doubts the truth of this.

“I—thank you,” he says, as Novak turns toward the door to leave. “Thank you, Mr Novak.”

“Don’t think on it,” the shepherd repeats. “I suppose I shan’t see you tomorrow, to learn of the sheep?”

“No,” Dean admits.

“And what of the next day?”

“Sunday?”

“Aye, the sheep don’t stop their grazing on the Lord’s account,” the shepherd smiles wryly.

Is this the first genuine smile he’s directed at Dean? Dean blinks. It suits the man, the twist of his lips, the spark of his eyes.

“Then—then yes,” Dean answers, “I suppose. I shall see you, then.”

“To learn to shepherd?” Novak seems surprised.

“What else?”

“Well, then. Perhaps after church, if you’re a Godly man.”

Dean barely is; he’s seen little in this life to evidence something all loving, all good, except perhaps the soil itself. But he shrugs.

“Take lunch with us, and we’ll set out, together.”

The shepherd smiles curiously.

“Just so,” he says, and leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! tell your friends:)


	5. Swifts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter should be up tomorrow! Enjoy x

Sunday morning the dawn arrives soft and steady as the soft lapping waves in the coves below the cliffs. The pain in his ankle is all but completely gone, the muscle back down to normal size. Perhaps Novak’s medicine _isn’t_ so ridiculous, after all, Dean thinks—and then laughs to himself. He’s up, dressed in his Sunday best, and waking Sammy up with a good mood that surprises even himself, to say nothing of his brother.

“You _want_ to go to church?” Sam blinks with a frown, rising stiffly in his bed and rubbing blearily at his eyes. Ellen has embroidered birds with curling wings about their surface, Dean doesn’t know them, cannot name them. But they have the curling, graceful shape of swallows, though with shorter tails. Must _everything_ turn back to birds?

“Sure,” Dean says, “come on. You know how much Ellen likes it.”

“I mean, sure…” Sam murmurs, shaking his head.

“I’ll wake Adam.”

Sam frowns. It’s rare that Dean voluntarily interacts with the boy.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Just—be nice…”

“I’m _always_ nice,” Dean protests, while Sam pulls an unconvinced expression down at his bedsheets.

“Adam,” Dean knocks at the boy’s door, before entering. Adam is scruffy haired and frowning, blinking and confused at Dean. “C’mon,” Dean says. “You’d better get ready.”

“Ready for what?”

_“Church.”_

Adam groans and rolls over in bed.

But in the chill air of the church hall, Dean can’t spot the face of the shepherd anywhere. He scans around them, all the way through the sermon, every one of the hymns, and during the liturgy before communion, but nothing.

“Dean,” Sam elbows him, muttering exasperatedly out of the corner of his mouth, “where’s your head at, today? I thought you _wanted_ to come here. You practically dragged me and Adam out of bed.”

“Let me be,” Dean growls. Still there is no sign of dark scruffy hair, oversized black coat, scruff of stubble. Dean frowns.

“Both of you,” Ellen hisses, irritated, “Hush!”

Back at the farmhouse, Dean is agitated. Had the shepherd been lying, when he’d promised to spend the day with Dean? He guesses Novak had second thoughts, realised giving shepherding lessons to Dean would mean getting fired sooner—the selfish _ass._ So, what, he’s not going to keep his promises, now?

When he slumps down, angrily, for lunch in the dining room, he nearly starts out of his skin when the shepherd pulls out the seat opposite him.

“You did—” Novak frowns at Dean’s shock, still standing, “—you did extend the invitation to me.”

“I know,” Dean flickers, scrambling to sit up, “I just—I thought you weren’t—”

“Well, why wouldn’t I?”

“You weren’t at church.”

Novak shakes his head and sits down.

“Your church would do it wrong.”

“Huh?”

“I’m Catholic.”

_“Catholic?”_

“You seem surprised.”

“No,” Dean shakes his head quickly, “just—”

“I grew up in _Kerry.”_

“I don’t know where that is,” Dean frowns.

“Ireland.”

“No, I got _that.”_

Ellen enters, carrying what is essentially an enormous _platter_ of golden-brown roasted potatoes and parsnips.

“Oh, Mrs Harvelle,” Novak clasps his heart, “I’ve not seen a sight _this_ beautiful since I was at the mountains of Connemara.”

Ellen chuckles and lays the platter down.

“Not that I know if they look any good, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“The most beautiful things on this earth, aside from your cooking.”

 _“And_ there’s gravy,” Ellen smiles warmly. Novak clasps his heart again.

“You were sent from above, I’m sure of it.”

Ellen titters and leaves to fetch more food. Dean frowns over at the shepherd, who shoots him a quizzical expression.

“You’re grovelling,” Dean frowns. “Stop it.”

His chest is swollen with jealousy, once again. Ellen takes so kindly to the shepherd, all his words and phrases, every one of his idiosyncrasies. He’s not been here a week, and already has riven himself in among the people of the Eyrie: Adam thinks him kind, Sam finds him thoughtful, Bobby sees him as hardworking, Mick as a trusted ally in a house full of Americans, Ellen as a charming and warm if mysterious young man, Jo as an intriguing longsuffering creature with a beautiful speaking voice. _Dean_ finds him insufferable, insidious, sarcastic, acerbic, smug, at once evasive and too honest, somehow both impolite and sycophantic.

“I think you’re confusing flattery for thankfulness.”

His voice is enough to raise pinpricks of frustration along Dean’s forearms. Nothing has provoked him like this before.

“I think _you_ need to stop behaving with such disgusting— _servility—”_

“Well,” the shepherd shrugs, “as you keep pointing out, I _am_ a servant.”

“I never should have invited you to dine with us.”

Novak looks up at him, curious, and riled.

“So why did you?” He asks. Dean inhales, ready to snark something, anything. But Ellen re-enters with gravy and roasted vegetables—parsnips, carrots, beetroot. The starlings in the room flitter about their golden cages, catching the scent of the food on the air and chattering to one another about it.

“A _feast,”_ Novak says, and Ellen glows. “This’ll be the best meal I’ve had in years.”

“You’re a charmer.”

“No, I mean it—is it Christmas? Did I sleep through the month?”

Ellen titters and runs a hand through the shepherd’s messy hair. If _Dean’s_ hair was like that, she’d almost certainly bitch about it. And Novak is their _guest—_ he should’ve dressed up. How is this fair?

 _“A feast,”_ Dean mimics after Ellen has left again. The shepherd looks back over to him, and inclines his head.

“You know the pendulum, which swings back and forth, in those grand old grandfather clocks?” He asks. Dean frowns, swallowing. He nods. “You’re like one of those,” Novak says.

Sam and Adam come in and seat themselves. Dean grinds at his teeth before raging at the memory of what the shepherd said to him last night: _You’ll grind them down to stumps, you carry on that way._

He balls his fist and glares at the dark wood of the table, varnished almost black. Around them, flashes of iridescent colour from the starlings flittering about the bronze bars of their cages. Novak, against the dark wood and walls of the room, and the flashes of fragmentary colour in the bird’s wings, fits in very well. He fits in _too_ well, in this house, this house which everyone seems able to twist roots around, find good soil to dig down in, except for Dean.

Bobby enters and greets a few of the chirruping birds before sitting at the head of the table, leaning his canes beside his chair.

Aside from this, the other members of household staff—Jo, Ellen and Mick—join them. The Eyrie is the strangest jumble of a house Dean has ever been in: servants dining with their master; Ellen tuts and ruffles at Dean’s brothers’ hair and calls them all by their first names; Jo insults and rolls her eyes; Mick spends half the time he should be working telling Bobby and Sam outrageous stories about his criminal past, and teaching Adam to gamble. The people in town don’t just have the impression that _Bobby’s_ eccentric, they seem to believe that it catches, that anyone spending to long in the Eyrie will turn warped and strange between the walls of their own skull. Perhaps Dean has been touched by it, too.

At least it mostly seems affectionate. If it wasn’t, Dean guesses people from the town, and even several towns over, wouldn’t come with injured birds for Bobby to nurse back to health.

Mick, upon the request of Adam, tells them a story of one of his escapades in the East-End of London, almost certainly embellished, about how he escaped from several policemen by charming his way into the passing carriage of a _duchess_ who, for personal reasons, he cannot give the name of.

Dean rolls his eyes.

But Adam gapes, and grins, and the shepherd nods his way through the story, eyes sparking.

Novak helps Ellen clear up when the meal is ended, and flicks his gaze over to Dean in such a way that Dean stands suddenly, spitefully, ready to assist, too. Ellen seems delighted with all the extra hands, says the place has never looked so tidy. The shepherd and her talk of how successful the rosehip jam was, and he asks her if she’s ever tried fuchsia berries. Dean didn’t even realise there was such thing, let alone that they were edible.

Once the kitchen and dining room have been tidied, Novak turns to Dean.

“Now, then,” he says. “Shepherding lesson?”

Dean wants to say no—feels the spiteful, indignant need to say no rising like bile through his system. But if he’s to get rid of the shepherd, he’ll have to learn from him, first.

Out in the vivid greens of the field, the grass vibrant and thick with Autumn, the air seems to expand in Dean’s lungs the way that leaves unfold and grow, steadily, in sunlight. The sound of the sea washing against the cliffs teeters over the cresting hills. The sound, and the wind around them, is like the fiddle played so unevenly and prettily in the tavern, last night. At least the cold air of England has done a good job of curing Dean of any hangover; he feels bright and alert with the chill—and the coldness of the church this morning saw to any lingering heaviness and nausea. Perhaps it’s deliberate in English churches: cold air to stem the reminiscent sting of spirits from the night before.

“First,” Novak says, “you must learn how to talk to Madra.”

“What?”

“The dog. She’s called Madra.”

_“Madra?”_

“Means dog, in Irish.”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“Imaginative.”

 _“You_ didn’t know what it meant.”

“This is going to be a long day.”

“You could just fire me now, and get it over with.”

Dean sighs.

“No, I couldn’t,” he shakes his head. “Not without Bobby’s permission.”

“These are trying times for you, Mr Winchester,” Novak shakes his head sorrowfully. Something in it seems sarcastic.

“Yes, thank you for your sympathy.”

“How’s your hand?” Novak asks. Dean blinks.

“Oh,” he says. “Um—yes—” the change of subject, and the new necessity of his gratitude toward the other man, startles him. “Yes. Better. I suppose I should thank you, for that—”

“No need.”

“Thank you,” Dean says, and is surprised that he means it. “Obviously you didn’t have to. I was surprised—I didn’t think that the plant stuff would work. And I didn’t think that you would want to help me—”

“Well, it wasn’t about wants.”

Dean frowns again.

“I was trying to be polite.”

“I was trying to be truthful.”

“Watch out, Novak, or I’ll work on framing you for something that’ll get you kicked out of here, quicker.”

“Mr Winchester, do you ever stand in wonder at the thought that you’re now nearly a _quarter_ of a century old, and still stuck behaving like you’re barely yet a quarter of a decade?”

“Just teach me how to herd these damn sheep,” Dean grumbles. “The sooner this day is over, the better.”

But the day sprawls, the day crawls. And yet Dean learns a great deal. Novak shows him how to call and command the dog, how to hold and approach the sheep—an old Irish trick, he says, and says the English wouldn’t know it.

“You won’t be taught this trick anywhere else,” he says, “apart from in my motherland. You’re lucky, you’re a privileged audience, now.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean says, unconvinced. But there is some old and ancient way in the shepherd’s manner with the sheep, like the chorus of a folk song, stirring something eternal and sleepy in the blood. He’s convincing, if nothing else. They roam Bobby’s lands, where bright green grass turns to sun-dried, golden and reedy grass.

“Was Ireland like this?” Dean asks, and the shepherd blinks at Dean’s question. They lean up against a drystone wall, occasionally calling commands to the dog. Madra. Weird name. “I mean,” Dean says, “did it look like this?” He gestures out to the hills, the cliffs, the sea beyond them.

“Oh,” the shepherd nods slowly. “No, wilder,” he says. “The rocks were angrier.”

“Angrier?” Dean repeats with a frown. All through today, Novak has had a strange and new understanding of the earth and soil and trees to any Dean has ever encountered before. He speaks about the ground like she’s some strange, possessed thing, a mistress at once both loved and feared, a wild horse you oughtn’t approach from behind, a star you can follow and give name to but know that she is grander and greater by far than her namer. “What does that mean?”

“Just that,” the shepherd inclines his head. Of course, Dean nearly rolls his eyes. Nearly an entire day of short, minimal, often evasive answers in spite of their frankness. How can one say so little, seem to answer thoroughly, and yet clarify nothing at all?

“Angrier,” Dean repeats, unimpressed. He folds his arms. The shepherd flickers a glance over to him, twitches a smile from the corner of his mouth.

“Aye,” he nods. “And not worse for it. Vibrant. But it’s softer, here.”

Dean looks out at the rugged, wavering landscape. It doesn’t seem soft to him. Soft to Dean? That’s the crops in Kansas, in the middle of Spring. Lush and hopeful with growth. Spring showers leaving spattered droplets of water across feathery leaves. Landscapes flattened and trodden down by millenia of grazing, wild farming. Hills cresting softly in the distance, in a violet haze. Not stretching wide and vast and sudden as a wave. _Cornwall_ is soft? What of the sea and its lash against the rocks? What of the jagged stone Dean cut himself on, just last night?

The shepherd seems to read his mind, for he lets out a gentle laugh, amusement pulsing unassumingly from his chest.

“I suppose it’s a question of perspective,” he admits.

“I’ll say,” Dean shakes his head. He still doesn’t understand.

“Here,” Novak turns to face Dean, and gestures with his hand, making the shape of cliffs with it, “the land shelters you from the sea. You’ve the Atlantic close by, to be sure, but not the same as my home. There, the rocks and fields and everything faces the sea, and not just a sea, an _Ocean._ She’s an angry thing. The rocks are angry with it. But also welcoming. Like a mother.”

Dean shakes his head. The shepherd is stranger than anything he’s yet encountered in Britain. And he lives on a farm popularly aligned with Bedlam by the people in town.

The light in the sky wanes, Dean’s hands are bitten by the chill of evening air. Novak glances to them with a frown.

“Well now,” he says, “I’d gamble you aren’t used to English weather?”

“Not yet,” Dean admits. “Kansas is—it traps the heat. Here warmth disappears with the light.”

“Just so,” the shepherd chuckles. The wind flickers at his dark hair, it curls in a light drizzle. “Come. We’ve about finished up here, for the day. Take a drink with me.”

Madra bounds ahead upon the realisation that they are headed back toward the croft.

“She’s hungry,” Novak comments with a wry look.

“I can’t blame her,” Dean holds a hand to his stomach, which growls. After the enormous lunch they had, this seems a little unreasonable of it.

“Aye, it’s hungry work, roaming the hills,” the shepherd nods seriously, though something in the gesture is mythic and ethereal, as though, in a moment’s moment, he will begin gushing proverbs and riddles each two halves of one whole. “Take dinner with me?” He cocks an eyebrow at Dean.

“I—” Dean stammers, and thinks with shame on his behaviour, and how little he has done to deserve this invitation, “I wouldn’t want to intrude—”

“I wouldn’t offer, if you were.”

“You’re probably a little sick of me—after lunch—and then today—”

“No,” the shepherd says thoughtfully, brows twining gently together over the flashing intensity of his features. “And as you say, you hosted me for lunch. Let me return the favour?”

“It was no favour,” Dean laughs, shaking his head, and Novak’s face shifts.

“I see the invitation is _very_ odious to you.”

“No,” Dean says quickly. “Not at all—only—” he doesn’t know what to say. “I would—I would be very grateful, to dine with you.”

The shepherd’s expression shifts again, washes with softness. Like the gentle waves, the gentle waves that lap at soft sands in the coves beneath the cliffs, away from the lash of the Atlantic. The soft waves which were like the dawn, this morning.

“Just so,” the shepherd smiles.


	6. Wood Pigeon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another chapter! i hope you're all holding up x

The croft fills with smoke and steam and the burgeoning smells of food. The shepherd cooks them wood-pigeon, stuffed with sage and rosemary and garlic, covered in butter, and wrapped in dandelion leaves. He slices bread, gifted to him by Ellen, he says, in thick pieces, and asks Dean to butter it. Then he turns back to the fire, tipping some spices—cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and a little honey—into a heating pot, toasting these before pouring amber liquid into it to warm.

“What’s that?”

“It’ll _be_ mulled cider,” Novak turns back to Dean. He picks up two pewter mugs from one of the shelves and places them at the table. The croft has filled with the warming scent of wintery spices on the air, caught with the soured fruit of weak alcohol. “If you just practice a little patience.”

“You say that like I can’t,” Dean frowns. “But I’m a _farmer._ I grow crops, till soil, plant seeds. For whole seasons, patience is all I have.”

Novak twitches a smile.

“Just so.” Silence, as he stirs the cider gently. The focus of his gaze on the pot has Dean’s insides clamping up. How can something be so soft and so penetrative? “Lay the table?” He asks, turning to Dean again. Dean rises and does so, watching the shepherd uneasily. There is a shelf with a few clay plates, bowls, cup and mugs, and mismatched wooden and pewter cutlery.

Once the pigeon is done, the shepherd takes it over to the table, along with the mulled cider. Dean ladles some into each of their mugs, while Novak plates up their dinner.

“You have an orchard here,” the shepherd says as he pulls up his seat.

“Yes,” Dean nods, seated opposite him. “Apples—cox and bramley, mainly—and a few pear trees.”

“You could make cider, yourselves.”

“This isn’t a brewery.”

“You could still make cider,” Novak frowns. Dean sighs, but finds it is slightly more affectionate than exasperated, and picks up his fork. “Aren’t you going to say grace?” The shepherd asks. Dean falters.

“Um—”

The shepherd sighs. He startles Dean by taking a hold of his hand and beginning,

“Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

“A—Amen,” Dean manages. The shepherd lets go of his hand, which goes suddenly cold in the air of the cabin, in spite of the fire. Novak picks up his fork and begins eating. Dean, resisting the urge to shiver, picks up the hot cider and takes a drink from it, hoping _this_ will warm the chill which has creeped suddenly into his bones. It does not. He wraps his hands around it and squeezes tight.

“You don’t like pigeon?” Novak looks up with a soft kind of smile, gesturing to Dean’s hands, curled around the drink.

“No, it’s not that,” Dean shakes his head. “Your cabin is _cold.”_

“Considering the fact you’re technically my landlord, that sounds like _your_ problem.”

“I’m not you landlord,” Dean denies, taking another long drink, which begins to warm him up, and removing one hand from the cup to start on his dinner. The shepherd pulls an unconvinced expression. “I’m not,” Dean says again, shaking his head. _“Bobby_ is.”

“And as you keep pointing out, you’ll soon take over the farm. And then it’ll be you.”

Dean decides not to reply, and instead takes a bite of his food.

“This is amazing,” he says, gesturing down to the pigeon.

“After our feast this afternoon, that’s awful kind of you.”

“No, really. It’s not flattery.”

“You have my thanks.”

Dean watches the shepherd as he eats. Novak’s eyes are on his food, not Dean. When he looks up, Dean wants to speak, but the words won’t form on his lips.

“You don’t get along with your brother,” the shepherd says, breaking the silence for Dean. He’d be relieved at the conversation, but _this_ isn’t the topic he’d choose. His features twine.

“Me and Sammy get along just fine,” he disagrees. “We get along well, in fact.”

“I meant you and your other brother.”

“My _half-_ brother?” Dean asks. “Adam?”

“What you’ve just said rather acts as confirmation.”

“That’s what he is,” Dean answers, resistance to the shepherd’s words flicking his insides in agitation.

“Samuel doesn’t seem to consider him that way.”

“That’s up to Sam.”

“Why are you so resistant to him?” Novak asks. Dean coughs once into a closed fist, frustrated.

“It’s not—it’s not resistant—” Dean stammers, but the shepherd seems unconvinced. “And if it is, it’s none of your business,” Dean frowns, leaning forward. The candles between them flicker, two dancing, dim suns on either side of them. Novak blinks slowly, unimpressed.

“He’s only a child.”

“When I was his age, I’d already been working on farms for _three_ years.”

“And that’s his fault?”

“You don’t understand,” Dean growls, and Novak inclines his head.

“Well no, I don’t,” he agrees. “Because you are refusing to explain.”

Dean opens his mouth, but again, no words will come out. The shepherd watches him, patiently, which almost riles Dean up, more.

“I’m not here to give you my goddamn life story,” Dean resolves with a glare. “I’m here to do my _job.”_

“Your job is to… sit in my house, and eat my food, and glower at me from the other side of my table?”

“I can leave, if you’d like,” Dean offers bitterly. The shepherd shrugs, sitting back. He takes a long drink of his cider.

“It would mean Madra would inherit your meal,” Novak says, and glances a warm expression down to the dog. “She’d certainly be grateful.”

“One reason to stay might be to spite her, then.”

“You really dislike dogs,” Novak frowns. Dean glances away, a muscle in his temple stammering. He wonders, for a few moments, if he should say what he does say, next.

“John—my father,” he coughs, “one of his friends set his dogs on me, when I was younger. I was fine with them before. Not after that—they can be…” he trails off. The shepherds brows have somehow both sloped and pinched together.

“Vicious, when they want,” he finishes for Dean.

“Yes,” Dean agrees. He tries to swallow, finds he can’t. “John just _laughed,”_ he says, and peers at Novak, and feels the strange clamouring need for some kind of absolution.

“Now why would he do a thing such as that?” The shepherd asks, face woven with concern. When Dean doesn’t answer, sadness as well as antipathy biting through him, Novak says, “If a man did such a thing to _my_ son, I’d have their guts for garters.”

“Then you’d make a better father than my own,” Dean answers. He takes a hard drink of the cider, wipes his mouth, then finds himself saying, “I’d begun—I was—I had a sweetheart.”

“Oh,” the shepherd smirks. Dean’s lip curls.

“Now, shut up.” He feels too sad to stop this coming out rather harshly. “She was—her name was Cassie.”

“Cassie?” Novak raises his eyebrows, looking unaccountably surprised.

“What, is that such a strange name?”

“No,” The shepherd falters, “just that—” but he bites his tongue. “Sorry. Go on.”

“Her name was Cassie. She was beautiful—she loved me,” Dean says, and his voice cracks, and he has to cough and breathe deep for a few moments. Mr Novak watches him, focussed and patient and intent, all the while. “And I loved her,” Dean finds himself confessing, though it’s hard to admit, even to Sam, because of all the pain that these words, and the feeling behind them, is bound up in. And longing. Still. Still a restless longing. “But she was—” Dean doesn’t know what to say, or how the shepherd will react. “—Her parents had been slaves,” is what he decides on, and Novak nods slowly, face washing with understanding. “And John was—not pleased—beat me somethin’ awful—I convinced him not to hurt her,” he says, lip trembling, “but—but he moved us, out of town, after that. Maybe for the best. It was _love_ —and love—a love like that, people don’t take kindly to it.”

“I understand,” the shepherd says seriously. “And young or not, I do believe that was love.”

Dean raises his eyebrows.

“Love,” the shepherd says softly, “is not possession. Is not clasping something so tight, you hurt it. Sometimes loving is letting go. Sometimes love is protection.” Silence for a moment, Dean nods sadly, blinking away the burn at his eyes. “Love is a funny sort of word for what it describes,” the shepherd chuckles, “as it doesn’t begin to describe it.”

Dean laughs breathlessly.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I think you’re right.”

“I am sorry for what happened to you, what you left behind,” the shepherd says seriously. “Both then, and… when you came from Kansas, to this new and strange land. I know what a thing it is, to lose a place, a people, you love…”

“How?” Dean asks. Novak blinks, faltering.

“What?”

“How do you know?” Dean says. “How do you know what it’s like?”

The shepherd draws a steady breath.

“Enough talk,” he shakes his head, waving his hand vaguely. “Enough of this sad, sorrowful talk. It brings out the bitterness of the dandelion leaves. Makes for a bad dinner.”

Dean sighs, unappeased, and takes another bite of his food.

“You like your secrets,” he comments to the shepherd, whose lips quirk through his mouthful. He takes a sip of his cider.

“As do you,” he replies, swallowing.

“Maybe,” Dean admits.

“Well, how’s this,” Novak leans forward, eyes trained on Dean like a gunshot. It leaves Dean breathless. “A secret for a secret. You share one with me, I’ll share one with you.”

“Deal,” Dean smirks, and lifts his drink. Novak taps his mug against Dean’s.

“Well, go on, then,” the shepherd says. Dean shakes his head, one part amused, one part offended.

“No, no,” he frowns, “I just shared one with you. A big one. It’s your turn, now.”

“Yes, but you told me that _before_ we struck up the deal.”

“What? How’s that fair?”

“It’s utterly fair. It wasn’t part of our agreement.”

“Next time I’m trading at the corn exchange, I’m taking you with me,” Dean grumbles. “If you’re half as good at bartering as you are at arguing.”

“I had five siblings,” the shepherd smiles, but his lips barely twitch upward as he does so. “If you’re any sort of gambling man, Dean, you ought to wager I have a talent for it.”

“I’m sure,” Dean nods. “And _five?”_

“Aye, a big family. But you see, _I’m_ counting half-siblings, there. And why shouldn’t I?”

“You say that quite pointedly.”

“I do.”

“And you give your opinion very freely.”

“And why shouldn’t I? I already count my employment under you as terminated, the moment it is to officially begin.”

Dean looks down. He takes another mouthful of his meal.

“Where did you learn to cook?” He asks. Novak shrugs.

“A big family… you pick things up.”

“Will you teach me?”

“All these lessons, Mr Winchester,” the shepherd shakes his head, eyes sparking. “Are you planning on paying me extra, for them?”

“Yes, in sullen comments,” Dean winks.

“And here I was, thinking I’d be getting those for free,” Novak rolls his eyes.

“No chance.”

“Well, alright. But you shall have to cook for me, some time, too.”

“Deal,” Dean smiles. “And you’ll be struck be the insecurity every teacher must feel, when their student surpasses them.”

Novak grunts.

“We’ll see.”

“We will.”

“For all your talk of disliking dogs, Madra has quite taken to you,” Novak observes. The dog has approached and, sitting quietly at Dean’s feet, stares pressingly up at him, eyes big and purposeful.

“Only because I have food.”

“Not _only.”_

“She didn’t seem too keen on me, before.”

“She’s like you,” the shepherd shrugs.

“What does that mean?”

“She has her walls.”

“Like you, too, then.”

The shepherd seems unconvinced.

“Mine aren’t walls.”

“Then what are they?” Dean asks with a chuckle. But the shepherd does not laugh, only frowns into the candlelight.

“Mine aren’t walls,” he repeats.

Dean watches the man, frown pinned to his features. The candles between them flicker in something, but there’s no draught which Dean could pin it on. Madra watches Dean with curious eyes. Dean frowns down at her, before returning his gaze to the shepherd.

“And, what?” Dean asks. “Whatever they are, is there any way through them? Are they ever comin’ down?”

The shepherd feeds a little pigeon to his dog, sadness stinging the light in his eyes.

“Not soon.”

“But some day?”

Novak shrugs.

“We live in hope.”

“You still owe me a secret,” Dean points out.

“I gave you one,” the shepherd frowns.

“When?” Dean asks. _“What?”_

“I had five siblings,” the shepherd points out. “I was one of six.”

“That’s not a secret,” Dean says, annoyed.

“It is to me.”

Dean sighs, leaning back. He finishes the rest of his cider, eats his dinner quietly. Novak frowns into the candlelight, still.

“So are we to make a habit of this?” Dean asks, breaking the quiet which had fallen over them like snow. Novak looks up and gives a quizzical expression. “Sitting over dinner by candlelight, trading secrets?”

“If you’d like.”

“I think I would.”

Novak chuckles. The sound is sweet and rough like the give of honeycomb.

“Let me be sure I understand you, Mr Winchester—I am to teach you how to shepherd, in anticipation of you firing me only to take over my post, and after each day of shepherding with you, and your sarcastic commentary for company, I am to teach you how to cook, with the food out of my own cupboard, and eat _my food_ while you drill me full of holes with questions?”

Dean grins.

“You don’t like the sound of that?”

“Hardly a fair trade,” Novak’s gaze is like pinewood in a fire. It catches Dean’s breath. The shepherd is something strange and pure, like the first rain of spring, warm but drenching.

“I thought you were good at haggling,” Dean points out.

“Ah, well, then. The pleasure of your company is fair trade enough.”

“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“They do?” The shepherd raises his eyebrows. “Explains why you resort to it, so often.”

Dean gapes out a staggered laugh.

“I never should’ve admitted to wanting to fire you,” he shakes his head. “You know you have nothing to lose. You’re taking liberties.”

“I know I can.”

Dean doubts he will ever get over the warm curl of the man’s accent. All his syllables close gently into themselves. It’s like music.

“Either way, I count on being taught shepherding, cooking, and—and whatever it is you do, with plants—how you recognise them, uncultivated, and do something with them. Useful things.”

“As a man who tills the soil, how does that make you feel?” Novak asks. “That I find things, unfarmed, and give use to them?”

“Threatened,” Dean admits, with surprising vulnerability.

“Americans,” Novak shakes his head, half care, half rue. “You’re the same as the English, just younger. And with, perhaps, more virility.”

“What does that mean?”

“The earth was never yours to claim.”

Dean opens his mouth, not certain of what words might crest on his lips, next. The shepherd watches him, which makes the sound struggle out, even more. The walls seem closer, here in the velvet dark, it presses Dean into leaning forward. But still, he has nothing to say.

“You dislike farmers?” He asks, instead of forming some kind of bitter, splintered rebuttal.

“Quite the opposite,” Novak shakes his head. “I’m _employed_ by one.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I think there’s nothing wrong with working with the land.”

“But?” Dean raises his eyebrows.

“There’s something wrong with _claiming_ it.”

“Every interval, you try to insult me.”

“You’re choosing to be insulted.”

“It’s my livelihood you’re damning.”

Novak shrugs.

“If that’t the way you see it.”

“That way I see it?” Dean asks, raising his voice. “That’s what you’re doing!”

“You’re awful defensive.”

Dean groans, buries his face in his hands.

“We’ll never get along.”

“And why’s that?”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I wasn’t aware you’d been trying to suffer me, in the first place.”

Dean lifts his head. Novak is watching him, head on that marginal incline it so often seems to tip at. The pots and bric a brac lining the shelves paint dancing shadows on the walls. The soursweet taste of the cider has pinned itself to Dean’s tongue. He licks his lips. The shepherd’s eyes track the gesture, something wolflike in his gaze. Little wonder he has devoted his life to keeping sheep.

“This is a transaction,” he finds himself saying. “I’m choosing to suffer you, for what you can teach me. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Novak repeats, voice laced with something—offense? Doubt?

Dean’s chest is tightened, spasms, in anger. What the shepherd rails inside of him, he doesn’t quite know, can’t quite understand. All anger and shame and resentment, Dean finds that he is more himself than ever around the man: as if anger and shame and resentment weren’t already the building blocks of Dean’s heart.

He swallows, trying to calm the angry hammer of his heart before he lashes out with something.

“Did you catch the pigeon yourself?” He asks, trying to shift the tone of the conversation. The shepherd blinks, unimpressed by the clumsiness of this move.

“No, I took it from one of Mr Singer’s cages,” the shepherd answers flatly. Dean balks, eyes wide, before realising at Novak’s expression that he’s pulling Dean’s leg.

“Ass.”

The shepherd makes a noise of agreement.

“Don’t ever,” Dean says, because he wouldn’t put it past the shepherd, this wild man who steals from nature herself instead of cultivating it.

“You think I would?” Novak raises his eyebrows, surprised. Dean nods.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did.”

“You can rest easy,” the shepherd says. “I’m not some low thief or vagabond, as you seem to think.”

“I don’t—” Dean frowns, taken aback, “I don’t think _that—”_

But Novak ignores him.

“Does Mr Singer eat _any_ kind of bird?” He asks. Dean snorts, but his insides still coil with worry—Novak thinks that _Dean_ thinks of him as a thief, a crook?

“Not that I know of,” Dean shakes his head. “He might eat the seagulls, given the chance, but that seems about it.”

“Hm.”

“He seems to think it’s cruel,” Dean offers nervously. “I’ve—” he smiles uneasily, attempting humour, “I’ve tried to tell him, cattle, sheep, pigs, they’re all definitely smarter than his chickens, but—anything with wings, Singer thinks of as some fallen angel.”

“Sciatháin…” Novak says softly, gaze a thousand miles away.

“What?”

“It means wings,” the shepherd answers. “In Gaeilge—Irish.”

“Right…”

“It was what my father used to call the hills we grazed on,” Novak supplies. “Because they spreads so far, so high, into the sky.”

“Oh…”

“And there’s your secret, Mr Winchester,” the shepherd looks up. His features are an oil painting in the amber light of the wavering paintbrush-candles.

“My—what?”

“Your secret. Mine, in trade of yours. I hope you think it a fair one. I don’t often talk of home.” The shepherd’s expression is sad, closed off, like a widower’s house. Dean opens his mouth, no sound comes out. Again. What is it with the shepherd and robbing breath from his lungs, words from his lips? “I don’t like to.”

Dean chews his lip.

“It’s like you said,” he manages, insides knotting. Novak gives him a look, encouraging him to elaborate. “We cannot claim the land. But the land makes claims over us, all the time.”

Novak hums, obviously struck.

“Just so,” he agrees. He peers at Dean, his eyes at once soft and piercing. “And what land is it, that has a claim over you, Mr Winchester?”

“Kansas soil,” Dean answers without hesitation. “The Great Plains.”

“The Plains,” Novak shakes his head, smile affectionate and uneven. It’s like the hum of a fiddle, wistful and broken. “I could never understand that. All that flat.”

“What’s wrong with flat?” Dean asks with a frown.

“The earth,” the shepherd says, “is not some dead thing which ought to lie still against itself.”

“No,” Dean disagrees with a laugh, “the earth is not some restless thing designed to toss and turn over itself like soil and stone stuck in a bad dream.”

“And that’s what the hills do, you think?”

“Hills, mountains, cliffs…” Dean shakes his head. “I miss the clarity of the Plains. The flat was freedom—if you could see anywhere, you could _go_ anywhere. Even if your mind. Even from the threshing field, you could pace the grasses, swing from trees trapped on the horizon, in your head.”

“But hills are the unknown,” Novak disagrees, “what lies beyond them—what the hide from view—that’s the adventure.”

“I can see we won’t agree,” Dean quirks a smile. The shepherd’s eyes spark.

“Perhaps not.”

“Nothing new.”

“Perhaps not,” the shepherd says again.

“Hills are oppressive,” Dean says, wanting to see the shepherd’s eyes spark again.

“The flat is suffocating.”

“Hills are overwhelming.”

“The Plains,” Novak says, seriously, “in offering no sense of a ‘beyond’, no sense of hope, either.”

“What, and hills are hopeful?” Dean laughs indignantly.

“Hills are the very definition of it.”

Dean shakes his head.

“You fit right into the Eyrie,” he decides, and the shepherd gives him a look of _Oh?_ “Yes,” Dean nods. “it’s filled with wastrels and oddities.”

“Mick is a wastrel?”

“Oh, for sure.”

“And Mr Singer an oddity.”

“Yes.”

“And Miss Joanna?”

“Both,” Dean laughs. The shepherd huffs.

“She’s a sweet girl.”

“She is,” Dean agrees. “—And—maybe sweet isn’t the word,” he chuckles. “But she’s somethin’.”

“I’m surprised you’ve not attempted to court her, in your time here.”

Dean frowns. What does the shepherd mean by this?

“What—why—what makes you say that?”

“Your brother has told me of your proficiencies with flirting, and your tendency to do so, at every opportunity.”

“When?” Dean asks, feeling poked at and attacked. “When did you two talk? And what else did you say?”

“It’s little cause for concern, Mr Winchester.”

“No, it is,” Dean frowns.

“You don’t seem like the type to take offense at that kind of comment.”

“Well, maybe I am,” Dean frowns. “Especially when you make it sound—like an accusation. Like I have something to be ashamed of.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Novak shakes his head, but Dean isn’t convinced the man means it. He glares.

“Well, I _wouldn’t_ try to court Jo,” Dean states, words with a hard edge like the stones piled up to make walls on the farm. “We _work_ together. And I’m technically—I mean, for all intents and purposes—her employer—”

“From what your brother’s said, that kind of thing hasn’t stopped you in the past,” Novak shrugs, “although perhaps you’re only happy pursuing lovers outside of your station, when that station is _above_ your own.”

“You’re a mighty fine host, you know that, Novak? Insulting your guests—”

“This house is more yours than it is mine,” the shepherd states, voice gentle and even. Dean grates his teeth.

“Dick,” he says, and nearly spits it.

“Does that mean I won?”

“This round,” Dean grinds out. He finishes his dinner, which has long since gone cold.

The fire has died down.

“Would you like me to walk me back to the farmhouse?” Novak asks. Dean shakes his head.

“I’d probably try to push you down one of the hills. See how much you like them _then.”_

Novak’s eyes spark again.

“Best save that for another day,” he says, and Dean agrees. Out in the piercing cool of night air, away from the croft, his heart thunders in his throat as he stares up at the whiteblue stars. He struggles to clear his head of the shepherd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> drop a comment, tell your friends, thanks for reading!


	7. Redwing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's the next chapter! thanks for all of your lovely comments last chapter <3 hope this assuages some of the anxiety over tonight's ep. loads of love

November, like the frost-bitten hills, rolls into December. Grass cracks underfoot, Ellen makes Dean a pair of fingerless gloves to assist him as he works, and Dean keeps a hold of the cloth Mr Novak bandaged his hand with, that drunken night. It sits at his bedside table and he finds himself staring at it, often, his mind tracing the ridges of cliffs he doesn’t recognise. The year is exhaling, trees have shuddered off their leaves and long months of cold—colder than it is, even now—draw in. Bobby laughs at Dean’s complaints, lets him know this is one of the warmest, by far, parts of England. Dean isn’t sold.

The shepherd continues his lessons. Dean learns the handling of both sheep and herbs. He gets, almost, proficient, as the days extend to weeks. Novak teaches by opportunity, not by structure, not by planning. A sheep breaks its leg and he shows Dean how to calm it, how to hold it still, how to make a splint. Dean watches the strong ridges of the shepherd’s muscles as he works, the careful attentiveness piercing his features as he tends to the animal, and is shot by something sharp and hard in his chest. A cow falls into the well and Novak is called upon, trusted by all on the farm, and he shows Dean the pulley system that will save the beast. Dean watches the hard tense of Novak’s muscles as they haul the ropes tied to the cow, lifting her out. Firm ridges moving like the grass on the hills in the wind.

Repairing one of the drystone walls round the stretch of sheep fields, Dean slices his hand open, for the second time in the shepherd’s presence, on a jagged piece of rock.

“Fuck!”

“That mouth of yours, Mr Winchester,” the shepherd frowns, but he’s already drawn close, dropping the stone he was carrying, where it cracks in two pieces—the shepherd pays it no mind. His hands are on Dean’s hand, examining the blood-weeping gash opened on his palm. “Making a bit of a habit ut of this, aren’t you?” Novak says, glancing up at Dean, eyes sparking playfully. Over the past few weeks, Dean has learnt to read these signals and flashes in the other man’s gaze: he smiles rarely, laughs more rarely still—but sometimes his eyes do the job for him. Now is one of those times. The laugh is as soundless as it is gentle.

“Thanks for the sympathy,” Dean rolls his eyes, but the shepherd has already tutted and taken him by his other hand—squeezing softly—to lead him up the hill to the croft.

“Idiocy scarcely garners sympathy,” the shepherd informs him matter-of-factly, hand still clasped around Dean’s uninjured one, and Dean growls. “Only pity.”

“It wasn’t idiocy!” Dean protests. “It was an accident!” The shepherd glances back at him, eyes a blue and blazing fire, “I…” The gaze, not for the first time, steals the words from his mouth. It only serves to make Dean angrier—it usually does. He hates that something about the shepherd forces him to…

Novak unlatches the door of the croft and they enter, out of the wind and into cold stone. Madra lifts her head from where she had been resting, beside the dying fire, which the shepherd stokes into life, adding a log before turning to his shelves, his many damned shelves, and picking up a strange, pale grayish-white thing—a type of horseshoe fungus?—slightly larger than his palm.

“Birch polypore,” the shepherd answers Dean’s quizzical look. He puts the kettle over the fire, grabs a clean cloth, wets it with some of the heated water, and tells Dean to sit. It’s an echo, again, of that drunken night in the croft, all those weeks ago. Novak approaches, sits opposite Dean—but not just opposite: his chair is pulled away from the table and drawn close to Dean’s, so that their knees are pressed together as the shepherd leans forward, taking Dean’s hand to clean it with the warm, wet cloth.

 _“Nasty_ cut,” he comments, and Dean agrees. “We’ll have to clean it,” he looks up to Dean, seriously. Dean squirms.

“With what?”

“I’ve got a bottle of gin in the cupboard.”

“Fuck, no.”

“Ah, so I guess it’ll be infection, then?” The shepherd raises his eyebrows. Dean shifts in his seat. His clothes have been bloodied by his hand. The wound is deep, and long.

“You don’t _know_ that it’d be infected.”

“You’re a gambling man?”

Dean sighs.

“I hate you.”

“So you keep saying.”

Novak stands and fetches the gin, tipping some onto the cloth. He comes back to Dean, seats himself, presses the gin-stung cloth to the wound on Dean’s hand. Dean hisses and tries to recoil, yanking his hand back at the whitehot burn of the alcohol on his raw nerves, but the shepherd is _strong—_ it’s not the first time he’s noticed this, and he doubts it’ll be the last—and so Novak maintains a tight grip on Dean, in spite of his struggle.

 _“Ow!”_ He exclaims, but the shepherd’s face is not sympathetic. He pours more of the gin onto the cloth. “No,” Dean begs, but Novak says, simply,

“It’ll be over soon.”

“Not soon enough.”

“How many years do you have, Mr Winchester?” The shepherd asks. “Surely enough to cope with a little stinging.”

 _“You’re_ not the one with his hand sliced open,” Dean grumbles, wincing in anticipation as the cloth is brought close to his hand again. He lets out a hiss of pain as it makes contact. But the shepherd dabs at the wound with a thoughtful kind of care.

“No, I’m not,” the shepherd agrees, and already, Dean knows what’s coming next. “And I wouldn’t ever be, now you mention it, because I have a head on my shoulders.”

“It could’ve happened to anyone,” Dean denies, but the shepherd squints.

“And yet it happened to _you.”_

“If you were any more insubordinate, they’d call you Brutus.”

“Insubordinate? What are you, my commanding general?”

Dean growls, shifting his gaze away angrily.

Novak stands again, the heat of his legs pressed up against Dean making the room that much colder when they are gone. He picks up a knife, takes it to the fungus—birch, birch what?—and peels off the skin at its underside, a strange foamy and rubbery kind of skin. He comes back to Dean, and seals the wound with this strange skin. Dean watches the man’s eyes as he works: charcoal lashes adding to the shock of his bright gaze, its kind intensity as he regards his work.

“Right…” The shepherd says slowly, tying a strip of fabric round the wound and over the fungus skin, before softly folding Dean’s fingers over the bandage. “The polypore should stay put, but just in case, I’ve bound it up. It’s antiseptic, too. The fungus. You’ll be alright.”

Dean watches the man, who contains a forest of knowledge inside his head. Perhaps all the forests in the world. At least, all the wild ones.

“Where did you learn all this stuff?” He asks, and the shepherd’s lips twitch.

“Now, I thought we only traded secrets over dinner?”

“There are no rules about when we can trade them,” Dean counters. “And it’s a secret?”

“And not one for now. What matters is, I learnt.”

Dean frowns sadly.

“You don’t trust me.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“Don’t use that hand, at least for the next day,” Novak instructs, ignoring him. “The wound might rip.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Dean rolls his eyes, “it’s only my right hand, and I’m only a farm _hand—”_

“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” Novak comments, seriously, standing up and picking up the dirtied cloth and dropping it into a bucket, then picking up the leftover fungus and slicing it finely. Dean frowns. The man is repeating Dean’s own words, over their first dinner together, back to him.

“What’re you doing?”

“Well, we might as well finish this up,” the shepherd states, pragmatically.

“I’m not hungry—”

“It’s not for eating,” Novak rolls his eyes, as though this much ought to have been _very_ obvious.

“Okay,” Dean frowns defensively, “sorry for the _ridiculous_ suggestion. Then what is it for?”

“Tea,” the shepherd answers. “I’m making a tea for us. Winter’s drawing in.” He drops the sliced fungus into a pot, and places the pot over the flame, filling it with steaming water from the kettle. “This tea will make it so that we never get sick, even during the cold months.”

“You seem awfully certain,” Dean comments, watching the shepherd bend by the fire. It paints his skin gold. Dean thinks, strangely and fleetingly, of the sunlight in Kansas.

“Have you ever seen me ill?”

“I’ve known you what, a few weeks?” Dean asks with an indignant laugh. The shepherd presses his lips together, eyes dancing like a blue pinewood fire. Novak stirs at the pot a few minutes, before turning back to Dean.

“We’ll leave the wall, for now,” he says.

“Are you sure?” Dean frowns. “I can still work—”

Novak gives him an unconvinced look.

“It’s nothing urgent,” he reassures. “We’ll keep the sheep where they are, and move them to the other field tomorrow, when the wall is fixed.”

“Okay,” Dean is uneasy. The shepherd sits back in front of him, and suddenly, they are close again.

“You feel uncomfortable, when you’re not working,” he observes, and Dean’s heart stammers. He doesn’t like the cut of this comment, nor the perceptiveness of those eyes.

“How—I—”

“Why?”

Dean swallows, heart flitting and flickering.

“What, so we _are_ trading secrets, then?”

Novak stares at him. Those eyes—it’s like being pinned to a wall, like having a hand to his throat. He hates the intensity of the shepherd and has no name for what it riles inside his chest, except anger.

“You worry, if you don’t work, something bad will happen.”

Dean clamps his jaw shut, his lips turning down. He stares at the shepherd and pours as much dislike into his gaze as possible.

“You are worried you will be replaced. That’s why you hated me, and my arrival, so.”

Dean swallows.

“Stop it,” he says. His eyes sting. He wrenches his gaze away. The shepherd’s still presses at him like wind in a storm.

“You won’t be replaced,” the shepherd says softly. His voice is a whisper in the dark. “You can’t be replaced.”

There’s little left in Dean’s lungs, but he still manages to exhale at this.

The air has grown thick, thick enough to be cut through. When he looks back up at Novak, the other man is close, watching Dean.

“You can’t be replaced,” the shepherd repeats. Dean stares into his eyes in a moment which seems to stretch for eternity, before finding that his head has tipped forward to rest on Novak’s shoulder. He takes in great, shuddering breaths, but still somehow, for some reason, the world is short of air. The shepherd’s hand comes to card through Dean’s hair, raising the skin at the back of Dean’s neck and making his breath stammer in like harsh waves on a restless shore. His heart thunders in his chest—he can’t think of the last time someone touched him like this: Bobby will clap him on the arm occasionally; on rare occasions, he and Sammy share a hug; _John_ was surely never physically affectionate with him, Dean can’t remember so much as a kind word from the man, let alone a kind action. Of his many love affairs, many of them were physical, many of them were _definitely_ physical—but Cassie was the only one who touched Dean with something that made his heart stammer. Being touched like that— _like_ that? Does Dean mean this? _What_ does he mean, by this—again, it unravels something in Dean’s chest as much as it makes that same chest constrict.

His breath starts coming in short with panic as much as the hand weaving through his hair, the fingertips drawing patterns at his scalp, stir something in Dean which _insists_ he all but melt into the touch. He feels like the delicate heads of poppies which must get bruised and battered as harsh winds tear around them and their bulbous heads, spindly stalks, paper-thin-skin pettles.

The shepherd’s palm cradles the back of his head. Dean turns his face downward into the man’s shoulder, worried that at any minute, he will lash out because of the raw vulnerability this moment has left him in, worried that this will spark a rage in him which will burn the beautiful silent startling delicacy of this moment. But why the rage? Why the inexplicable fear and anger, setting alight to his insides, in this moment?

And why the sting of wild longing?

The thought cannot complete itself: the shepherd pulls back, hand slipping onto Dean’s shoulder and squeezing softly a moment while Dean, startled and confused, can only blink and have no idea of where to look.

“It’s growing dark,” the shepherd observes, looking at the land and sky outside of one of the brittle croft windows, growing silvery in the receding light. “Sun’s setting… What do you want to do?”

“What?” Dean asks, blinking, confused, breath short in his chest which seems set to wring itself out in every moment since the shepherd first touched him.

“Will you eat here? And if so, what would you like?”

“I don’t care,” Dean shakes his head, words clipped, head a thousand miles away. He feels giddy. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the shepherd for making him feel this way; he feels _angry_ at the shepherd, in fact—is it the man’s stupid herbal, old world medicine, which is doing this to him? What was in the gin, which mingled straight into his blood? What was in the fungus, which is making his head float away from his shoulders, the world turn to the fog like that surrounding port cities?

“Fine,” the shepherd says, and seems put out by Dean’s shortness. “I’ve some fish I caught and smoked, yesterday?”

“Sure,” Dean tries to swallow, but finds that his mouth is too dry.

“Are you alright?” The shepherd asks, catching something in Dean’s expression which must give away how adrift he feels.

“I’m _fine,”_ Dean trembles out.

“I could make you a—”

“No,” Dean raises his voice, anger flaring, “no more of your stupid—your damn—your ridiculous folk, pagan, whatever you want to call it, magic potions—”

The shepherd cuts him short with a look. Dean glares, but for some reason finds that he could cry, too.

“You have lessons to learn in respect, boy.”

“I’m not a _boy—”_

“Oh?” The shepherd asks, and for the first time since Dean has known him, raises his voice back at Dean. “Then stop acting as one.”

“The moment Bobby gives me the power,” Dean grates out, heart thundering against his ribs, “I’ll have you out of this building, off of this farm, with nothing but the pack you came with, and that dog at your heels.”

“The Lord speed that day.”

Dean’s breath is like rain hammering against a tin roof. The shepherd turns to his shelves and pulls off several items, quarters an onion and drops it into an old iron pot with some chestnuts. He places this on a shelf just above the fire, and just below the heating tea. He takes out the fish and wraps it in bittercress.

Ordinarily, Dean would help with this preparation—any other night would be standing beside Mr Novak, learning the names for plants he’s never seen before and their various uses, and often some strange and wild magic story behind them: how one day, the moon had been weeping and her tears had dropped to earth and grown this strange and alien looking plant; how once a sailor and mourned his lost love for so long that he had been turned into a tear-salty herb which could grow only on sand by the wind-battered sea. Now he sits and watches. The shepherd works silently, brow furrowed, but whether this is with anger or concentration, Dean cannot tell.

Eventually the anger in Dean’s chest is extinguished, perhaps by the pinch between the shepherd’s brows or the way he bites his lip when focusing. As his anger mutes, his shame grows. His face heats, a hot itchy heat which grows across his cheeks and makes the chair he sits on feel hard and uncomfortable. He stands, and Novak looks at him.

“Can I help?” He asks, voice unsteady. The shepherd continues to frown.

“It’s all but finished, now.”

“Sorry…”

“Well, you are my employer—I suppose I hadn’t realised that in being your shepherd, I would also be your _cook—”_

“No, I’m not sorry about that,” Dean shakes his head, “—or,” he fumbles, at the look he is given by the shepherd upon this declaration, “I _am_ sorry, but not so sorry as I am—as I am for being such—for being so—”

“It’s forgotten,” the shepherd shrugs, and Dean’s heart tremors hopelessly.

“No, it’s _not,”_ he disagrees. The shepherd shrugs again, saying nothing, and turns to the fire, with a thick cloth in hand to pull off the pot and place it on the table. The fish, which has been smoking just above the flames, is also taken down and placed upon one of his clay plates.

“Finish setting the table?” The shepherd asks. Dean does so, hopeless and wordless. The shepherd prepares them some yarrow leaf tea to drink alongside their meal. The tea from the mushroom, he says, will take a while longer, still.

Dean stares at the man as they settle down to eat. He can believe Mr Novak grew up with the shore-battering Atlantic on his doorstep. Something about his gaze is as vast and unknowable as that ocean.

Dean can’t think of what to say to fill the mist of silence set inbetween them.

“This is delicious,” he tries, but the shepherd looks up at him, unconvinced.

“You’ve yet to take your first bite.”

Dean stuffs some into his mouth, and makes a theatrical noise of enjoyment, saying,

“See? I could tell it would be.”

Novak rolls his eyes.

“Roasted chestnuts,” Dean says, and the shepherd’s lips twitch marginally.

“They’re one of my favourites.”

“Mine, too.”

“At last, something in common.”

“We have plenty in common,” Dean frowns, heart pricking with hurt. “In fact, maybe _too_ much.”

“Oh?” Novak raises his eyebrows. He takes a bite of fish. “What things?”

“We both live and work here,” Dean points out, and the shepherd lets out a soft huff of laughter.

“Aye, there’s that.”

“And we both travelled to get here. And neither of us feel that it’s where we belong.”

“Well, that’s different,” the shepherd shakes his head. “My world is to wander, to roam from hill to hill. I’m all mobility. Yours is to plant seeds, dig down. All of you is entrenched.”

“And so, what?” Dean asks. “You’ve never had a home?”

“I didn’t say _that.”_

“Then what did you mean?”

“We are from different worlds,” the shepherd says softly, peering at Dean with those intent, intense eyes.

“I know,” Dean rolls his eyes. “You’re from Ireland, I’m from Kansas—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then _what?”_

The shepherd shrugs and doesn’t answer. He eats his meal. Dean watches, frustrated.

“Is this one of those, secret for a secret, deals?” Dean asks. Novak shakes his head.

“There’s little to be said,” he answers. Dean lets out an exasperated growl.

“You’re beyond impossible.”

The shepherd neither agrees nor disagrees. Dean sighs, begins on his meal properly. Dean wonders how a man can be at once so humble and so arrogant.

“Alright,” Dean tries again, “we’re both stubborn.”

“I’m not stubborn,” Novak disagrees.

“What the hell would you call it, then?”

“I know myself,” the shepherd shrugs. Dean groans.

“You’re only proving me right. Okay, what about this, we both find beauty in the natural world.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Fine,” Dean grates out. “We’re both orphans.”

“That’s enough common ground, Mr Winchester,” brightcold eyes flick up to meet Dean’s, he draws back where he sits. They eat the rest of their meal in silence. Once finished, the shepherd rises, takes Dean’s plate, and sets them aside. He takes the stewing tea from the fire, ladels a little out into a cup for Dean, and says,

“This is mighty bitter. Would you prefer honey in it, or rather just drink it in one and be done?”

“Um,” Dean squirms, “what’re you going to do?”

“You trying to impress me?”

“No,” Dean glares, “I just—I just don’t know the custom—”

“There’s no custom,” the shepherd smirks, “it’s tea made out of a fungus. You wouldn’t exactly catch the Queen drinking it.”

Dean chuckles in spite of himself.

“I’ll take the honey, then.”

“Just as well,” the shepherd says, and spoons a little honey into Dean’s drink, stirring. “It really _is_ bitter. You might want to drink this all in one, anyway.”

Dean smiles, watching the other man. His dark hair is darker in the room, scruffy from the wind, the angles it sticks out at make him look younger, make him look like a man barely out of his teenage years, and flush with youth.

The shepherd hands him a cup. Dean wraps his good hand around it instinctively, the shepherd smiles at the gesture.

“My home still a little cold for your hot blood?”

“Perhaps it’s your icy stare,” Dean counters. The shepherd chuckles, pouring his own cup and spooning honey into it.

“The heat of your constant rage and resentment toward me ought to warm you up,” Novak takes a seat opposite Dean again.

“It’s not all rage,” Dean finds himself saying, softly. The shepherd’s eyes change, look like the wind tossing gently at waves as he looks up at Dean. He seems suprised. Or…

“No?” He asks.

“It’s not all rage…” Dean repeats.


	8. Robin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> had the worst time with this one. the document crashed and didn't recover, so I had to re-edit everything and editing is my least favourite part. I also lost a really good scene from the next chapter so RIP, that's sad. but anyway, here we are! This one's disgracefully festive but in my defense we're comfortably in November, now. Loads of love!

Mid December, Ellen weaves holly and mistletoe wreaths and hangs them about the doors of the farmhouse, dark green ones with bright red berries and dusty green ones with pale, orblike berries. Adam is delighted, intent on helping her in the craft of all of these. Bobby chuckles warmly every time he sees the child run past with a new sprig of something to tie into the circles. They’ve never had a Christmas, a _real_ Christmas before—well, Adam has with his mother, on consideration—but not Dean and Sam. Sam is quietly excited, Adam brims with it. It’s good to see them both so happy, so settled.

Dean continues learning from the shepherd—more and more. The man is like a still, wide river. He runs deep. Dean has spent day in, day out with the man for a month, now—and still he cannot claim to know more than a few inches of those yawning depths.

Out in the fields, a few days before Christmas Eve, he and Mr Novak sit on a drystone wall, watching Madra stalk a murder of crows. The pair smoke from a pipe of the shepherd’s, he casts Dean a funny look when Dean said he’d been dying for some tobacco for weeks.

“This isn’t tobacco.”

“Oh?—Then—”

“A mix of sage and mugwort.”

“Mugwort,” Dean nods, smiling as Madra stills theatrically when one of the crows notices her efforts at stalking and eyes her warily. “That’s what you were looking for, the night you fixed up my hand.”

“That’ll be the one.”

“Ruled by the moon?”

“Just so,” the shepherd smiles encouragingly. He says this often, Dean has learnt—whenever he teaches Dean something, and Dean mimics or executes it correctly, this will be the gentle response of the farmer. _Just so._ Simplicity forms on his lips like spun gold. Dean has never found things so humble so enchanting.

“Just so,” Dean nods in agreement, mouth quirking on one side. “It gives you vivid dreams?” He asks.

The shepherd confirms, obviously pleased with Dean’s having paid attention to his lessons.

“It was used for divination, in times of old.”

“I’ll let you know of my dreams tonight,” Dean promises. The shepherd nods thoughtfully.

“I’ll do the same.” He’s completely earnest with this, no trace of a laugh in his voice. His sincerity makes Dean’s heart warm inside his chest.

Dean puffs at the pipe when the shepherd offers it to him.

“Your youngest brother seems excited for Christmas,” the shepherd offers as conversation. Pale skies roll over the hills, which are dark green with winter.

He makes a point of doing this—will insist on referring to Adam as _brother_ and not half-brother, step-brother, bastard brother like Dean is used to. Slowly it has even changed the way Dean speaks about the boy.

Dean lets out a wry chuckle.

“Oh, for sure. But he’s a kid, of course he would be.”

“You say that like you’re not?”

Dean shrugs.

“John was never much of a festive man…” He answers. The shepherd purses his lips unhappily. When it becomes clear that Novak is saying nothing in order to encourage Dean to continue, he says, “he’d spend the day drinking—like any other day, I guess. The worst part of it was that, it being Christmas, most of everywhere was closed up. So he’d be drinking at home.”

“And he wasn’t a kindly drunk?” The shepherd asks.

“Not by any book.”

“I’m sore to hear that.”

Dean sniffs.

“It’s fine,” he says, and takes the pipe offered to him again. After a few puffs, he says, “I think it’s hard to separate. You know. The Christmases I had, growing up, versus the ones I might be able to get, now. I _want_ to have a good time, but… I don’t know. Is it fear? I don’t know what the word is.”

“I understand,” the shepherd nods softly. Dean passes the pipe back to him.

“And what about you?” Dean asks. “What are you to do, on Christmas day?”

The shepherd shrugs.

“I’ll probably roast some chestnuts, curl up with Madra, heat some wine.”

“On your own?”

“I’ve no family to return to.”

“Well, maybe not to return to,” Dean frowns, “but you’ve got a family _here._ Spend Christmas day with us.”

The shepherd glances over to him. It’s the first time the mask which covers his face, always, has slid off completely. It only happens for a margin of a second, but it steals Dean’s breath, utterly, all the same.

“You needn’t—”

“Listen, Jo, Ellen, _and_ Mick are all gonna be there. They’ve got nobody else, either. None of us have. We’re all like you—why do you think Bobby adopts all those damn birds, anyway? Why do you think he’s so close with his _servants?_ Hell,” Dean laughs, “why do you think he named me as his heir, the moment he found out about John’s death? The man’s _lonely._ He needs people around him—the more, the merrier, and he _likes_ you. If nothing else, come along for him.”

Novak smiles softly, lips quirking.

“Perhaps…”

“Not perhaps,” Dean shakes his head. “It’s an _instruction,”_ he grins.

“Am I in any more danger of losing my job, if I disobey?” The shepherd asks, and Dean laughs.

“No,” he says. “In fact, if you refuse to show up to the farmhouse on Christmas, I promise I’ll keep you employed here for the rest of your days, and you’ll spend _every day_ in misery, harassed by me and my terrible jokes, and my angry comments.”

“Not misery,” the shepherd disagrees unexpectedly, and Dean’s heart twitches.

“Well,” he stammers out, “either way. You’re very much invited. I’ll only take it as grave personal insult if you refuse to come. And you’d be committing some great affront, to the spirit of Christmas, if you bailed.”

“Oh?” The shepherd asks, eyes sparking. “How’s that?”

“There’s, like, _four_ orphans you’d be refusing to spend the day with. Me, Sam, Adam, Mick. And half an orphan, in Jo.”

“I don’t think you count as an orphan if you’re no longer a child.”

“You’re too cruel, Novak,” Dean grins. The shepherd’s eyes dance.

“Perhaps.”

“So that’s a yes?”

Novak chuckles.

“I have a feeling you’ll be set upon making my life miserable, if I say no.”

Dean grins again, wider.

“Damn straight,” he confirms. “Even more miserable than I’m making it, already.” The shepherd rolls his eyes. “And come for Christmas Eve, as well. Everyone will be there. It might even be fun.”

“Alright Mr Winchester, you repeating it isn’t going to make it any more or less true.”

Dean laughs.

“I’ll see you then.”

And he does. A heavy knock comes at the door on Christmas Eve just as Adam tosses some cinnamon sticks into a huge saucepan of mulling wine.

“That’ll be our shepherd,” Mick comments, sat back at the kitchen table, feet up as he shuffles a deck of cards elaborately.

“Get your feet down, Mick,” Ellen says, glancing back at him with eyes widening as she spots the offense. “That’s _disgusting.”_

Dean barely responds to the lighthearted look Mick gives him—he’s out of the kitchen, and down the hall before he has time to question why it is he’s so eager to open the door to the shepherd. But Sam has beaten him to it, and opens the door.

“Well, hello, young master,” the shepherd greets, eyes warm. He tips his hat to Sam as he is greeted, but when he catches Dean stood, a few yards behind him, he falters and takes it off completely.

“Mr Winchester,” he greets, and Sam glances back at him, wavering out a frown. The night is cold: cool air rushes through the house and Sam coughs awkwardly at Dean and the shepherd’s strange mutual staring as Novak stands at the door, neither out nor in. The shepherd apologises, steps in, Madra following obediently at his heels—Dean wonders what she will make of the birds, and worries what Bobby will make of _her_. Sam closes the door after them.

“You came,” Dean beams as the shepherd approaches him. The man seems somewhat taken aback, though his features wash with warmth as he regards Dean.

“I feared my fate if I refused,” he says, and Dean huffs out a laugh. Sam trails behind them as they head down the hall.

Up in the drawing room, Mick and Sam have put up an enormous Christmas tree, too tall even for the room: its point grazes the ceiling. Adam frets about how he’ll be able to mount the star onto its top.

“The chairs aren’t high enough,” Ellen admits sympathetically, looking worriedly up at the tree. “Sam, did you have to pick something so _tall?”_

“Mick picked it, too,” Sam frowns defensively, and both Dean and Ellen roll their eyes, and catch each other doing so with a flash of amusement.

“The chairs are big enough that Sam could get the star on, if he stood on one,” Dean points out, “he could just do it?” He suggests, but Adam looks crestfallen.

“Perhaps,” the shepherd says, gently, “if _I_ lifted the young master up, he might be able to reach high enough?”

Adam’s eyes flash, his face lights up with excitement.

He looks at Dean, as if asking permission. The shepherd’s eyes fall on him, as well.

“I mean,” Dean says, heating under Novak’s gaze, “as long as you don’t hurt yourself, I can’t see why not.”

“I promise I won’t!” Adam beams, as if he could ever promise such a thing. Dean rolls his eyes again, but is surprised by the affection in his chest prompted by the boy’s excitement.

“Perhaps,” Novak says once more, “if Mr Winchester would help, too, you’d find yourself with even steadier footing?” He addresses this to Adam, but his eyes are on Dean as he says it. Dean’s pulse quickens. Adam looks up at him with big, hopeful eyes.

“Dean?”

“Alright,” Dean sighs, prickling under the shepherd’s gaze. “How d’you wanna do this?”

Adam is held up, by one leg by Novak, the other leg by Dean, close enough to the tree that Dean wrinkles his nose at the pine branches in his face. The shepherd chuckles at Dean’s expression, glancing at him, and Dean’s stomach flips inexplicably. Their shoulders are pressed together, they stand close, side by side, as Adam leans forward, reaching up for the very top of the tree.

 _“Nearly,”_ he says slowly above them, voice unsteady with concentration. “Near _ly…”_

“Careful, Adam,” Ellen says from behind them, fretfully.

“Nah, Adam, you’re fine,” Jo encourages, “see if you can knee Dean in the face.”

Sam snickers behind Dean to his left.

“Hey, Adam,” Dean glances up at his brother, “when you’re done up there, make sure you fall and land on Sam and Jo. Okay?”

Adam laughs nervously, the shepherd beside Dean sighs.

“I’m not kidding,” he shakes his head. “You get my fruitcake if you hit Sam, my gingerbread if you hit Jo, _both_ if you hit both—”

“How come I’m the fruitcake?!” Sam asks indignantly. “Everyone hates it!”

“Well, I suppose that’s your answer, Sam,” Dean quips, but Ellen hushes them.

“Stop it, you two,” she tuts, “look, he’s nearly got it!”

 _“There!”_ Adam exclaims victoriously, and Jo and Mick applaud loudly. Dean and Novak coordinate stepping back from the tree in unison, before putting Adam down.

“Did it!” Adam exclaims when he hits the floor. “That was scary. But fun!”

“Uh-huh?” Dean raises his eyebrows and quirks a smile. “Glad to hear it. Good job.”

The shepherd gives Dean a soft look as he ruffles the kid’s hair, before Adam darts away to accept Mick’s invitation to a game of cards.

“What’re you thinking?” Novak asks, drawing close beside Dean as he watches Mick and Adam settle at a table, Mick with a hidden card just visible at his sleeve.

“That Mick’s a cheat,” Dean answers, gesturing, and the shepherd lets out a soft huff.

“His dice are weighted, too,” he says, and Dean twitches a smile. “I played him at a game of liar’s dice. Word of advice: don’t.”

“I suppose you shouldn’t be surprised,” Dean answers, turning to the man, who raises his eyebrows. “It is called _liar’s_ dice.”

The shepherd chuckles.

“Too true,” he nods.

“But if _I_ asked you to a game?”

“Aye, I’d trust you more than I do our footman.”

“Praise indeed,” Dean quips, as Adam loses a hand and exclaims in surprise and confusion. Mick takes his cards, smugly. Dean smirks and shakes his head. They move to an adjacent table and sit after Novak has pulled a set of dice from a nearby cupboard.

“Well, there’s a steadiness about you,” the shepherd shrugs, taking a seat opposite Dean. “In spite of it all. You aren’t the sort to cheat for fun.”

“In spite of it all?” Dean repeats. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The shepherd doesn’t answer him. He hands Dean four dice, and when it becomes evident that no answer is to escape from the shepherd’s lips, Dean lets out a frustrated huff. They begin to play. Madra settles at their feet. Sam eventually comes over to sit at another chair adjacent to the pair. Madra, probably able to sense how much he loves anything that can so much as bark, sits up to put her head on his knee. Sam smiles distractedly as he watches the game, playing with Madra’s ears. For a creature which isn’t a cat, she makes a sound remarakably close to purring.

Dean lets out a frustrated noise as he loses another die, now on his last one, and the shepherd’s expression softens even as he smiles, amused. It makes Dean clamp his jaw.

But then Dean wins the next round. And the next.

He frowns up to the shepherd, whose expression remains static, unreadable.

To test the waters, Dean makes a ridiculous call. In his hand, he’s rolled a three, a five, and a six.

“Five twos.”

The shepherd looks up, brow twisted. There is silence you could cut through.

“Six twos.”

Dean glares. The shepherd’s face is as ever, a mask. But Dean is _sure_ that something behind those features flickers.

“Liar,” Dean says, and lifts his hand to reveal his roll. Novak does the same. He’s rolled two twos, a one, two fours, a three and a six. “Well,” he says, graciously, “you’ve won this round, too, Mr Winchester.” Dean glares.

“You’re losing deliberately,” he accuses. Sam coughs out a laugh into his fist. “Shut up, Sam,” Dean glowers, before turning back to the shepherd. “—Aren’t you?”

“I’m not so afraid of losing my job, that I’d let you beat me in a game of _dice.”_

“No?” Dean raises his eyebrows. “Well, you’re still letting me win. It’s patronising as all hell. Stop it.”

“Dean, don’t curse on Christmas _Eve,”_ Ellen glances over and sighs. Dean’s jaw clamps.

“Mrs Harvelle makes a good point,” the shepherd says, voice infuriatingly gentle, and Dean could throw his dice right in the man’s face.

“Then _stop_ losing deliberately.”

“As you say.”

They continue playing. Novak wins the next round, and Dean catches Sam smirking in his peripherals.

But the shepherd _definitely_ loses several rounds, deliberately, prolonging the game needlessly.

“Okay, you’ve bolstered my ego enough,” Dean sighs to the man, “you can win.”

The shepherd chuckles softly.

“Just so.”

Another five minutes, and Novak has won the game, as per Dean’s instruction. Sam quirks a smile as he watches.

“Can I play?” Adam comes over, having lost at least tree games to Mick in this time, and feeling obviously hard done by.

“Of course,” Novak smiles, shifting his chair to make room for the boy. “You’ve played Liar’s Dice before?”

“With Mick,” Adam confirms, and the shepherd’s eyes spark.

“Ah, and I’m sure he did _very_ well, when he played you.”

“He’s so good at games,” Adam says defeatedly, all innocence, and Dean smirks. The shepherd catches his eye.

“That he is,” he confirms, “but perhaps playing him has given you good practice.”

Adam hums hopefully, and in the next round Novak goes so easy on him—Dean following suit at the man’s silent request—that Adam wins and glows with pride, suspecting nothing.

“Now look at that,” the shepherd smiles graciously, “you have both of us beaten.”

“I don’t know how,” Adam beams earnestly, “normally I lose so _terribly.”_

“Isn’t that strange,” Dean comments dryly, flicking his gaze over to Mick, who grins and shrugs.

“Beats me,” Mick says, before turning back to Jo and continuing to teach her a card trick.

Sam joins in for the next game, but eventually Dean gets bored and forfeits, wandering into the kitchen to help Ellen with whatever it is she’s cooking. The shepherd watches him leave.

He’s in the kitchen, placing an enormous smoked salmon on a platter, when Novak appears at the doorway, watching him with steady curiousity.

“Can I help you?” Dean asks, raising his eyebrows to the man, who steps into the room slowly, heavily, still regarding Dean.

“I came to offer my own,” he answers, voice low and lilting, somehow more lilting than ever, like the idea of song is woven into it.

“You’re a sweet thing,” Ellen smiles, “but I think we’re just about finished up. Help Dean and I carry all this through?”

“Of course,” the man smiles, and picks up the warmed plates by the help of the gloves Ellen offers him.

Dean follows him out of the room.

“It’s nice to see you helping Mrs Harvelle,” Novak comments as they make their way down the hall. Dean bristles.

“Now that seems like something of a loaded comment,” Dean grumbles, and the shepherd’s expression twitches affectionately in the darkened hall.

“Not at all,” he shakes his head. “I meant it genuinely.”

“But you were surprised?” Dean asks, and they’re in the dining room, laying their things on the table.

“Pleasantly.”

“Ass,” Dean mutters. “I help _you_ all the time.”

“Define _help.”_

“And ordinarily,” Dean continues, “I come in exhausted from work. Is it so bad that I don’t help out? It’s not as though I’ve been lazy.” He sighs, jaw clamping. “You’re always _berating_ me,” he complains, with more vulnerability than he intended.

The shepherd looks at him.

“I’m not meaning to,” he says. His voice is gentle, nearly apologetic but also fringed with something else. “I’ll make sure not to, in future.”

“You’ll have nothing to say to me at all, if you do that,” Dean points out. They head out of the room, back down the hall, into the kitchen.

“I’m not so sure, Mr Winchester,” the shepherd shakes his head. “You’re an interesting man. I’d think of something to say to you.”

Dean’s head is snapped up. He stares at the shepherd, but Novak’s gaze is on the dish of roasted parsnips Ellen hands him. What does the man mean? _Interesting._ Dean’s never been called that before—and he’s been called many things.

Ellen gives Dean a bottle of wine— _good_ wine—and a handful of glasses.

“We really _are_ celebrating, aren’t we?” Dean grins to her, and Ellen titters and ruffles his hair. Dean is almost taken aback by the gesture, he stops short for a couple of moments, heart in his throat. Everywhere, from the top of his head where she touched him, to his very fingertips, tingles warmly.

He heads back out to the hall, into the dining room. The shepherd is laying down the parsnips when he approaches the table, laying a glass at every place. He gives Dean a small nod. Dean swallows.

Sam comes swinging in, Adam after him, each taking a seat. Bobby is helped in by Jo, and Mick carries in the potatoes—cooked with rosemary, and Dean’s stomach growls at the sight, which the shepherd hears, and his eyes twinkle at the sound. Dean swallows again. Ellen enters last, and Dean insists she sit at the head of the table, after all her hard work, and Bobby agrees. Again, the shepherd’s eyes twinkle. Dean takes a seat near the foot of the table, Bobby at the foot, and the shepherd takes a place beside Dean. Their elbows graze a moment as the shepherd takes his seat.

Ellen says a prayer of thanks, to which Novak _Amens_ in a voice quiet but firm and sure enough that it carries, even under Mick’s cheer and Bobby’s emphatic _Amen._

Eyes flitting round each face, Dean considers what a strange patchwork group this is. Sam seems to think the same thing; he catches Dean’s eye and flashes him a knowing smile as Jo sparks up a debate with Bobby about the best Christmas Carol, and suggests they sing one. Dean groans at the idea.

“Are you not one for Christmas cheer, Mr Winchester?” The shepherd asks, eyes warm albeit pressing. They startle Dean’s breath from his chest.

“I’ve plenty of Christmas cheer,” Dean rolls his eyes. “It’s just that I’ve heard Jo’s singing voice, and I can’t say I care much for it.”

Jo turns to glare at him, while Mick scoffs.

“And what about you, Novak?” Dean asks. “What do _you_ think of Christmas.”

The shepherd shrugs, though something in his gaze withdraws. For how coldblue his eyes are, Dean feels oddly colder still at the something—whatever it is—drawing back.

“A haunting time of year, for men lonely as me,” he confesses, then adds, “but made that much warmer, by present company.”

“And what’s your favourite carol?” Jo asks, between a mouthful of buttery winter greens.

“Hm,” the shepherd hums softly. “Oh, now I’m not too sure you’d be familiar,” he confesses. “Old Irish hymns.”

“Well, what of the ones we _would_ know?” Adam asks.

Novak’s eyes flicker and flash in the wavering candlelight. He looks ethereal, some remarkable, strange creature come down to earth, the Christmas star, or one of the chorus of angels who visited the shepherds, gracing their dining room and shimmering just the same as the shimmering feathers of the starlings which flit between their glowing bars.

“I suppose,” he says, “your _Coventry Carol_ is one I enjoy.”

“But that one is so _bleak,”_ Jo bemoans. The shepherd’s eyes crease sadly at their corners.

“I’ve never heard it,” Adam shakes his head. He looks over to the shepherd. “Would you sing it for us?” He asks. For the first time, Dean thinks, the shepherd draws back, features obviously betraying his thoughts, or at least his feelings. His cheeks seem to heat in the dim light of the candles and fire and flashing feathers of starlings all about.

“Alright,” the shepherd falters, and Dean’s heart twitches at the vulnerability of his voice. He coughs, and takes what Dean thinks is quite a large gulp of wine. Dean dutifully fills up his glass for him, and the man flashes a smile, warm and slightly nervous, but definitely grateful, to Dean, before beginning.

When he starts, it’s like no carol, no hymn, Dean has heard. It’s a lament.

_Lullay, lullay  
My little tiny child,  
By-by lullay, lullay_

Pinpricks are raised all along Dean’s forearms, the smile slips off his face. What is the shepherd mourning? Why do tears press at Dean’s eyes to hear his voice? The man is more, far more, of a singer than Dean would have guessed, his voice, ordinarily shale-like, turns to liquid gold on the air. There’s still some inexplicable gravel to it which brushes along Dean’s skin, rubs itself slowly along his neck in curling animal motions: half of his voice grazes Dean’s fingertips like the soft tips of reeds in the shining fields of barley in which he works, the other half is like the rock Dean sliced his hand open on that one drunken night, so many weeks ago. Something in it splinters and lodges itself inside Dean, sticking, stuck, at his chest. How could he apply plantain or polypore to _this_ wound? What will draw it out?

 _Lullay, lullay_   
_My little tiny child_   
_By-by, lullay, lullay_

_Herod the king, in his raging,  
Chargèd he hath this day  
His men of might in his own sight  
All young children to slay._

_That woe is me, poor child, for thee_ _  
And ever mourn and may  
For thy parting neither say nor sing,  
"Bye bye, lully, lullay."_

Stillness has settled over the room. Dean stares at the shepherd, but as soon as the man’s gaze meets his, Dean flits his own downward, heart in his throat. He swallows thickly.

“Well, you certainly sing better than Jo,” Sam breaks the silence, and Jo threatens to throw a roast potato at him.

“You sing beautifully,” the words are past Dean’s lips even before he realises he has thought them. Several sets of eyes turn on him, surprised, but he doesn’t take it back. “Beautifully,” he repeats. “Hauntingly.”

“Thank you,” the shepherd gazes at him. It’s like standing in cold moonlight.

“You should sing, Dean,” Sam turns to him to smile. “You’ve a pretty good voice, too.”

“Oh, _pretty good,”_ Dean repeats, rolling his eyes. “Thank you, Sam.”

“My pleasure,” Sam grins back. Dean gives him a dirty look, but the shepherd’s request of, “Do, please,” startles him.

“What—what would you have me sing?” He asks.

“Whatever is _your_ favourite,” Novak answers. Dean’s guts twists. He isn’t sure he has one—Christmas is a time so wrapped in pain and grief for him. What could he sing, that wouldn’t destroy him? Perhaps Novak did well to choose a lament. He settles on a song which was always Cassie’s favourite, heart panging in a motion remarkably similar to that when the shepherd began singing.

 _I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day_ is what he chooses. Novak watches him like a raven hung in the air, Dean has to avert his gaze. When asked about it by Mick, he says briefly that it was the favourite carol of a once-sweetheart. Novak’s eyes turn down to his plate.

“Well, aren’t you all a sorry and miserable bunch,” Mick rolls his eyes. “If we’re to sing anything, it ought to be happy, tonight of _all_ nights.”

“And what would you suggest, Mr Davies?” Bobby asks, affectionate and gruff. Mick answers _O Holy Night,_ and insists that all of them sing it. They do, Ellen beaming and practically glowing, which fills Dean’s chest with a little sweetness to assuage the haunting sadness which is the echo, he thinks, of Novak’s voice. Mick sings it enthusiastically, Jo practically shouts the final verse and chorus, Adam grins happily through his mouthfuls of food as he sings.

“Right, enough now,” Dean shakes his head when they’re all finished. “No more singing. My food’s getting cold.”

They eat, and laugh, but the feeling in Dean’s chest doesn’t dim, rather grows into some unknowable nervous flicker like the beating wings of a bird against a cage.

After dinner, they settle on the settees and armchairs beside the fire in the drawing room. Ellen and Adam mull some wine for them, and Bobby recounts his first Christmas in the Eyrie with his wife, eyes distant and misty and slightly awry with the amount of wine he’s consumed. Adam asks for more stories, but Bobby’s eyes have turned sad by the time he’s finished this first of his, and Dean wonders whether it’s his place to recover the situation.

But the shepherd does it for him.

“Perhaps another tale, perhaps a Christmas tale,” he suggests. “One that might even cure our Mr Winchester of his grumpiness toward the holiday?” He flashes a smile over to Dean, who rolls his eyes. “Have you a copy of _A Christmas Carol_ in your library?” He asks Bobby, though it’s Sam who confirms. He jumps up excitedly.

“I’ll get it,” with a grin, long hair flopping about with the ferocity of his movement. Hard footsteps as he paces out the room, disappearing down the corridor. He comes back with a small volume in his hand. “Here it is!”

“That was Karen’s copy,” Bobby smiles sadly, drunkenly. The shepherd turns to him with understanding.

“A mighty sacred thing, then,” he says, and Bobby confirms. “I’ll handle it as such,” he promises, and Bobby’s eyes glitter from behind the shadow of his features. “Perhaps,” he looks up, “we could each read a chapter. Dean’s insides tense up.

“No,” he shakes his head, quickly, hoping the ruddy glow of the firelight will conceal the flames at his cheeks.

“Why not?” Sam asks, obviously put out and having looked forward to this idea, but Dean’s insides are still cold and tense.

“I don’t want to,” he frowns, and drains his wine, before ladling some more from the enormous pan Ellen has placed on an iron trivet on the table between them all.

“Well, there being only five chapters, there’s not enough for all of us to read a stave,” Novak says gently. “Anyone who doesn’t want to read is more than welcome to sit back. They all agree this is a good idea—Bobby looks like he is ready to pass out at any second, and Mick only laughs when asks if he’d like to join in.

But upon the shepherd starting— _Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that—_ in that wild, rough, strange, enchanting voice of his, all the music of old poured into it, the others agree that he should read the text in its entirety. Dean is happy to keep the shepherd’s wine topped up through all of this, to keep his voice from grazing at his throat any more than it usually does. It’s bewitching, the story is bewitching, the _shepherd_ is—

He takes a few drinks, Dean adds some extra honey to Novak’s mulled wine to ease on his throat, and is thanked warmly for it. By the fifth stave, Dean has already teared up multiple times, and has to turn his face away from the firelight to hide it.

 _“Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in,”_ the shepherd reads, and Dean’s breath stutters. He stares at the ground and when the shepherd has finished Mick, Ellen and Jo applaud warmly, Bobby jolts from his snoring and pretends to have been listening all along, and Sam beams and compliments Novak on his reading, while Adam nods in emphatic agreement.

Dean tries to take a steadying breath but finds it ragged and uneven, turned to torn paper in the wind. He tries again, it doesn’t work—what has him feeling like a rag battered about by a storm? His eyes are misty when he turns them up to the shepherd, whose own gaze is on Dean. Dean can’t speak and doesn’t, but Novak doesn’t seem to expect him to.

Mick insists that they all sing _Silent Night,_ which is apparently only truly appropriate on Christmas Eve—so this is what they do. The voice of the shepherd carries on the air like the warmth in the smell of the first day of harvest, or the ruggedness of the smell of salt off the sea. His eyes stay trained on Dean’s face throughout—he probably caught Dean practically in tears over the stupid story he read, and now he’s most likely thinking of what a pathetic specamin Dean is—he squirms uncomfortably, frustration and resentment coiling in his gut, along with something else. He’s ready to lash out. But what’s the something else? It’s the colour of wheat ripe for harvest, the smell of apple skin. Everything is warm and gold. Everything is confusion, in spite of the acute and tentative sense of _peace_ in Dean’s chest.

They stay and chatter a little, but Bobby is fast asleep within half a minute and Jo is yawning, eyes red. Slowly, the others all head up to bed, Sam offering to help Bobby up the stairs, which are hard enough for him at the best of times, let alone when he’s drunk and exhausted. It’s strange—Dean is so used to seeing older men turn angry and cruel with their drink—the more alcohol in the system, the more hate in their hearts, in Dean’s experience. But Bobby, though ruddy faced and occasionally offering grumpy quips, makes no digs aimed at Dean, no jibes or jabs, no attempt to start a fight and expect Dean to somehow be both victim and mediator.

In the end, yes, Bobby is helped up by Sam. And after Mick yawns and offers them a warm goodnight, and merry Chritmas, he leaves only Dean and the shepherd in the room.

“Well now,” the shepherd says, and seems ready to stand and leave, when Dean interrupts.

“You—you read very well.”

The shepherd twitches a smile.

“Thank you.”

“Do you—do you often do that? Give readings?”

The shepherd stills a moment, considering.

“When I was young, my mother would have myself and my siblings read to the family, over dinner. It was good practice, and comfort in a cold time.”

“Cold time?”

“We had little.”

“But books?”

“A few.”

“What would you read?” Dean asks. He’s sat on the floor, the shepherd on an armchair. He shifts subconsciously toward the man as he speaks.

“The Bible,” Novak says, and his expression is so still and steady and yet is like being hit by a hurricane. “Keats, Shelley. Blake and Burns.”

Dean nods quietly.

“Oh.”

“And what do you like to read?”

Dean squirms, looks down, face hot. Shame burns through him. Yes, he can name the feeling, it’s hot and coursing shame.

“I—” he tries. “Don’t know. I—” He hasn’t even been able to confess this to Sammy. He looks at his hands, lips playing downward. He cannot tug them up. He looks up at the shepherd, who watches him silently, earnestly. Really—the man would not judge him, would he? Novak is too steady, respectable, for that. It’s a surprise _he_ can read, surely—his mother’s insistence seems to be some rare unusual thing, at least, he speaks of it as though it were something special, though perhaps that’s just because it’s a memory, a precious memory…

“I can’t read,” Dean confesses, or rather finds himself confessing. His face prickles hot with needles of shame. “I—well, I taught myself, a little—but—I can’t—”

The shepherd doesn’t look at him with mirth. He nods softly.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I had no idea. Your brother is such an avid reader—”

“I—I had to—I started work,” Dean says, “and was never really—not really—”

“I understand,” Novak’s voice is quiet and lilting for all its roughness, barely above the crackle of the fire. “You feel some shame over that?”

Dean raises his eyebrows, frustrated.

“You wouldn’t?”

“It’s not your fault,” the shepherd reasons. Dean looks away, lip curling. “But you’d like to learn?” The shepherd asks. Dean shrugs, face hot. Sam has always seemed to have to key to some secret and joyful world which Dean, for his illiteracy, was barred from. A door which could never open to him. “If you would, you know,” the shepherd says slowly, carefully—is he nervous?—“I could teach you.”

Dean’s head flits back up, over to the man.

“What?”

“Just that. I could teach you.”

“You’d do that?” Dean asks, something raw on the abraded skin of his heart.

“What’s another set of lessons?” The shepherd asks with a shrug and a soft smile.

Dean shakes his head.

“I—I—”

“You don’t need to say—”

“Thank you,” Dean says, earnestly. He bites down on his pride. He focuses on his gratitude. “That’s—I’m so grateful—”

“Don’t be.”

“I am,” Dean says, presses the words earnestly toward Novak. “And will be. You’re sure?”

“You’re not too bad a student,” the shepherd says warmly. “You listen well, when you want to, and you’re sharper than most, perhaps,” he says, and says it warmly, “one of the brightest people I know.”

“Stop flattering me,” Dean rolls his eyes, but manages a laugh.

“I think you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t,” the shepherd quips, and Dean laughs fuller, warmer, now.

“Perhaps not,” he admits.

The shepherd moves to sit on the floor opposite Dean. Their knees are nearly touching.

“When would you like to start?” He asks.

“Whenever you would,” Dean answers, strangely breathless. “I—I know I must be burning you out, demanding so many lessons from you—”

“You’re at the point of doing half my job for me,” Novak chuckles, and shakes his head. “I’ve been feeling something superfluous, of late.”

“Never,” Dean shakes his head. His voice is barely raised above the lick and crackle of the flames in the fireplace. “Never.”

The shepherd hums softly.

“Well then, Mr Winchester,” he says, “what say you we start Boxing Day. There’ll be little else on our plates.”

“Dean,” Dean corrects. The shepherd blinks. “Call me Dean,” he says, asks, requests, perhaps pleas. “Please. Call me Dean.”

Novak falter. He blinks again.

“Really,” Dean says. “Please call me Dean.”

The shepherd nods, and the nodding seems to soften him. He looks down to Dean’s hands, looped over his knees, then back up again.

“Just so,” he says, voice steadying itself out. “Dean.” He nods, twitches a smile. A tender moment of silence. “Just so.”

Dean cracks a smile. The firelight plays with the shepherd’s fine-carved features, amber in its light. The man is remarkably tan for someone who has spent the entirety of their life so far north. Dean reminds himself of the many hours the shepherd must have walked in the beat of the sun, even if it was an Irish sun, and not a dry, bright Kansas sun. Now the fire makes him glow a red-dipped gold.

“What’s your name?” Dean asks, voice hardly above a nervous tremor. The shepherd blinks with surprise, but it’s warm, it’s limb-curlingly warm.

“My name,” the shepherd says, voice low, but not with conspiracy, “is Castiel.”

_Castiel._

Dean mouths it, staring at the shepherd, before he says it.

“Castiel.”

“Just so.”

“And,” Dean says, pulse flaring nervously at the juncture between his jaw and neck, “may I call you that?”

The shepherd huffs out a warm breath.

“You may,” he answers, and his words are like the mulled wine they have drunk dry, tonight. Sweet and heavy and spiced.

“Castiel,” Dean says, and says it again, and something in his gut clenches hotly. “Castiel.”

He could say it over and over. It’s music, it’s water, it’s wine.

“If you’re about to laugh—”

“Never,” Dean shakes his head. “Never, Castiel.”

The shepherd Castiel carries the light of the stars, infinite and eternal as they are, in his gaze.

“Well, Dean,” he says quietly, and Dean’s name on his lips is the thump of apples falling to a grassy floor in Autumn, is the wind teasing through wheat, is the knife breaking through the crust of a loaf of bread as it slices, “I ought to take my leave.”—But he oughtn’t; Dean doesn’t want him to. Why doesn’t he want him to? “I thank you for your hospitality—and wish you a very merry Christmas.”

“Yes—” Dean stammers, “yes—you too—you—” he fumbles to stand as the shepherd does. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“If you’ll still have me,” Castiel smiles. Dean nods emphatically.

“Absolutely. Always.”

“Goodnight, Dean,” the shepherd says. His voice is rough with sleep and speech.

“Goodnight,” Dean answers, chest tight, “Castiel.”


	9. Rock Sparrow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter bc we're all probably having a terrible time atm. this one's nice and soft. loads of love! xx

On Christmas Day, after the gift-giving and eating has wound down, Dean is up in his room, hanging the smart shirts Ellen gifted him with a look that said, _now you’ll have something nice to wear on Sundays_. There comes a soft tap at his door.

“Come in,” he calls, expecting Sam or Adam, but is taken aback to see the shepherd at the weathered doorframe, peering in.

“Hello, Dean,” the shepherd greets—and God, it’s still taking some getting used to, hearing his name on the man’s lips.

The sun is slowly setting behind the sea outside Dean’s window. His room is painted plashes of wintery colours by its decaying golden light.

“Castiel,” Dean greets, strangely breathless, dropping the shirt he’d been folding..

“I hope I’m not interrupting?” The shepherd asks, and Dean shakes his head quickly.

“No, not at all,” he assures. “Come in. What is it? Come—come in—”

Castiel flickers a smile and steps into the room.

“I thank you for the gift you gave me, today,” the shepherd smiles—Dean had gifted him a small steel knife to assist him in his foraging, with a wooden handle Dean carved himself with small and abstract swirls and patterns of sheep. “Rare that a gift is so practical, and beautiful. Thank you for your thoughtfulness… I’ve something for you, but thought I would gift it in private—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Dean shakes his head, but Castiel draws closer, and holds out a small, red-bound and battered book. Its edges are frayed and where it is most worn, its colouring has turned almost violet. Dean takes it slowly, turns it over with all the thoughtfulness and disbelief of an illiterate, fingertips tracing the lines of the title with a creeping sense of wonder.

“It’s Shakespeare’s _Twelfth Night._ I have always found it enchanting. I thought we might use it to start our lessons. And I thought it might also serve some purpose, in furnishing your room. It’s funny, the brightening a book can do.”

Dean looks from the book to the shepherd.

“Thank you—” he manages.

“It’s really nothing.”

“I saw how little you brought with you, coming to the Eyrie,” Dean shakes his head. “This is one of the few things you owned,” he says. “Are you—are you sure?”

“You’re a worthy recipient.”

“Thank you,” Dean says again, heart in his throat, certainly not feeling worthy, _certainly_ not feeling worthy—not of the gift, nor of the shepherd who gave it. “I feel that I should—I feel I should teach _you_ something—give _you_ lessons,” he laughs, breathless, “to repay you for everything. But everything I know, I think you’d know already.”

“I doubt that,” the shepherd shakes his head. He seems closer to Dean than before. They stare at each other, a moment of soil-thick tension, before Dean breaks it.

“What’s—what’s it about?” He asks, holding up the book.

“You’ll find out,” the shepherd answers simply, with a smile.

“But you won’t tell me?”

“You’ll find out,” Castiel repeats. Dean flickers a irritated frown, but the shepherd pays it no mind. “Now, I ought to return downstairs,” he presses on, ignoring Dean’s expression. “I promised your younger brother a game of cards. I think he prefers playing with me to losing to Mr Davies.”

Dean lets out a breathless laugh, forgetting his frustration at the glint in the shepherd’s eye.

“Yes,” he admits, “I wouldn’t be surprised.

He watches the strange and wraith-like man leave.

When he comes downstairs to the drawing room, Adam, Sam and Castiel are indeed all knotted in a game of cards, Adam grinning happily, probably at the fact that he isn’t losing terribly for a change. Dean’s heart is warm. Warmer than it has been in years. Maybe since before his mother—

That doesn’t matter. His heart is warm, now. That’s what matters.

…

“A December lamb,” Castiel smiles as Dean wipes down the newborn. Fuck, who knew delivering them would be so visceral, so draining? “Now there’s a heartening sight to warm these cold months.”

Dean smiles too, exhausted.

“Yes,” he agrees, wiping the sweat from his brow carefully with the back of his forearm—he’s covered in—well, he doesn’t want to think about it. Birth _smells._ But Castiel is so inspired by it, bright with it, as though the very idea of life in all its vivid visceral fullness is worth beaming over, perpetually—even by someone who seldom smiles are rarely laughs. Even in all life’s gore and messiness and fear.

But the shepherd smiles, and even laughs, increasingly in Dean’s company.

“And one, two, December lambs,” Dean corrects, as the second lamb they have pulled out from the ewe is licked at by its mother and shakes delicately in this new, strange world.

“Aye, and both surprises.”

“They say our previous shepherd was not a reliable man.”

“It seems it,” Novak cracks a smile and hooks his finger, fishing out a lot of disgusting looking substance from one of the lamb’s mouth and throat, when it begins coughing.

“The intention was for lambing to start in early spring,” Dean informs.

“And all the others are on track for it,” the shepherd says graciously, fishing out the same kind of gunk from the other lamb’s mouth. Dean watches him and can’t stop watching him. Not the process—which he should be learning, if he really _does_ want to replace this shepherd, some day—he watches the shepherd. Strange and constant as the soil. And somehow just as life-giving.

“Spring seems a long way away, in all this mist and mire,” Dean says. Fog sweeps round the hills and mists washes up from the spray off the sea. Dew clings to the long lush grass and is brushed off the blades underfoot.

“These lambs are a thing of hope, then,” Castiel says earnestly, and Dean’s heart warms in his chest.

“Yes,” he agrees, falteringly.

“And a good practice for you, before the real lambing begins,” Castiel comments wryly, and Dean nods.

“True. Perhaps by the spring, I’ll be better at this than you.”

Novak chuckles.

“Good luck,” he wishes. He wishes it sincerely, and yet in such a way that Dean stil smirks. “Miss Jo seemed awful excited about the newborns,” he comments. Dean smiles.

“Completely,” Dean agrees. “She’ll be glad to meet them. For someone who sees them every spring,” Dean shakes his head wistfully.”

“They never lose their charm, in my experience,” the shepherd comments softly, blinking slowly as he regards the little creatures shaking beside their mother with enough affection and wonder to make Dean’s insides sieze. Dean is struck by wonder at the thought that the shepherd is able, perpetually, to find joy and wonder in the certain treadings out of his own life: every year he sees lambs, helps them in being brought into the world. Every year, it seems, he thinks it beautiful. Is that not itself some strange kind of wonderful?

“Is that so?” He asks.

“Just so,” the shepherd nods.

“Well, I look forward to experiencing this all again, come spring.”

“And every spring after that, when you inherit the farm. You’ll be at the fore, I expect, especially when you kick me out.”

Dean prickles at this joke. He doesn’t know why it grazes his skin like the surface of the cliffs below. He presses his lips together.

“I’m not,” he frowns, and swallows thickly, disliking the bitter taste in his mouth. The shepherd’s eyes flick up unexpectedly to him. When Dean can’t finish, can’t get the sentence out, the shepherd helps by changing the subject.

“Adam seemed awful excited about the lambs, as well.”

“Damn,” Dean groans, and Castiel frowns either at the language, or at the regret in Dean’s voice, or both. “He probably would’ve wanted to be here,” Dean clarifies, and the shepherd softens, seeming—touched? “We should’ve called for him. He’ll be sad he missed this.”

“Come spring,” Castiel reminds. Dean nods in assent.

“Come spring,” he agrees, “I suppose there’ll be plenty more.”

“Just so. Now then, how about we clean ourselves up?”

Dean looks down at himself, his arms dirtied up to his elbows, and the various stains at his clothing.

“Yes,” he agrees, though thinks with exhaustion about the walk back to his room. “I suppose we ought to.”

“Come to the croft, with me,” Novak offers, rising, and still watching the lambs as their mother sniffs and licks at them. “The walk to the farmhouse doesn’t seem worth it.”

“Will the lambs be okay?” Dean asks, frowning cautiously at them. Novak smiles at Dean’s concern.

“Aye, I’d say so. Mother’s bonded, is cleaning them. She’ll be stood up soon. And they’ll be causing terror in no time. Let’s cherish this peace while we can.”

Dean nods, licking his lip. Golden thrills chase through his chest as he stands and follows after the shepherd. Castiel walks a step ahead of him but Dean makes no effort to catch up, fascinated by the ancient ringing of the shepherd’s gait.

In the croft, Novak stokes the fire into a humming crackle and heats some water over it, pouring it into a large basin, which he places on the edge of the large table at the room’s centre. Dean watches him move about the room and realises after a minute or two that he has watched, and not ceased watching, and said nothing. Been unable to say anything. But the shepherd has said nothing either, though he has certainly marked Dean’s staring. The basin is filled, water steams softly at its surface, Novak checks the temperature absent-mindedly before taking out some cloths and dropping them beside the basin. Dean approaches it and sinks his arms into the waters, up to his elbows, splaying his fingers out and letting out a long sigh. He closes his eyes and breathes deep but in a second senses the shepherd’s presence close at his side.

Castiel huffs and, reaching around Dean, tips a handful of dried lavender seeds into the basin of hot water. Their scent unfurls at the touch of the steaming water, and rises up on through the heavy air. Dean twitches a smile even at Castiel’s obvious, nonverbal assertion of his inconvenience.

“Lavender,” he starts slowly, muscles uncoiling at the warm water and the smell which lightens his system, “always reminds me of Ellen.”

“Is that so?” The shepherd asks, voice kind in spite of its shale.

“It’s her favourite smell,” Dean says. “She hangs it, dried, in every room of the farmhouse. Have you noticed?”

“I might have,” the shepherd shrugs easily. He watches Dean swirl his hands easily about in the water.

“She even put lavender in my bath, my first day here.”

“Hang lavender at doors, and you’ll ward off foul spirits,” Castiel says, quiet and sincere. A smile catches Dean’s lips; he stops the laugh before it escapes them.

“You believe in that kind of thing, do you?” He asks.

“In these cruel cold months, you don’t?” The shepherd raises his eyebrows, and at this Dean does crack a laugh.

“Good point,” he assents. The lavender seeds send tendrils of steam to unfurl happily within his lungs. “Tell me more about lavender,” he says, and closes his eyes again, and tips his head back as behind his eyelids, the soft lapping flames in the hearth flicker ruddy and gold.

“More about lavender?” Castiel asks. There’s amusement in his tone. Dean smiles, eyes still closed, head still tipped back. “Well, once—by this I mean, a few centuries gone—it was used by maidens to have visions of their true love.”

Dean tips his head down and smiles at the shepherd.

“And did that work?” He asks, sincerely. His voice catches with something—not delighted, but close to it—at the thought.

“I wouldn’t know,” the shepherd inclines his head. “Not being a maiden from a few centuries gone.”

Dean laughs.

“Okay, fair enough,” he assents. He closes his eyes again.

Heat from Castiel’s body warms one side of his own. The shepherd has drawn close. He dips his day-dirtied hands into the warm waters of the basin alongside Dean, his shoulder pressed to Dean’s own, his foot snug alongside Dean’s. Dean’s breath catches as his eyes flicker open. The smell of the lavender, the warm water, the day and the success that it has seen—Dean helped deliver two lambs into the world, and what an unlikely miracle of life it felt, and feels, at the close of December, the decay of a year and opening of a new one… He is heady with it. Heady with something.

Castiel’s fingertips graze his own in the water. Dean wavers his gaze to the shepherd, but the shepherd does not withdraw. He watches Dean. Dean’s breath would be ragged and uneven, his heart a hot flash in his chest, were it not for the ethereal stillness of the moment. He stares. Again, he stares at the wild wandering man who roamed onto their farm and has patiently abided all Dean’s abrasiveness, every glare, every quip, with the grace of a saint and the wit of a playwright. His hand, grazing Dean’s hand, in the warm and seed-perfumed waters, sings of that steadfastness, Castiel’s remarkable and quiet capacity to abide, abide, abide with…

With Dean?

They still stare at one another.

No, stare is too hard a word. Not for this. Never for this.

Novak is the first to speak. His words catch on the sweet-smelling air between them like they too are perfumed steam rising from heated waters.

“Am I in your head, too, Mr Winchester?” He asks.

As though it is the simplest mystery in all the world.

Dean’s mouth, open, lets out something like a sigh, but no words will follow it.

_Am I in your head, too?_

What is in Dean’s head, what has been in Dean’s head, from the moment he saw the shepherd standing, scruffy, strange, in Bobby’s study? Is Castiel in Dean’s head? And _too—_ is Dean in Castiel’s head? His skull rings with it. Dean is in the shepherd’s head. In moments of low light and twitches of starlight, what enters Dean’s head is a pierce of blue like lightning over a rippling sea. When he sees cliff faces—which now, on a farm beside the roar of the sea, is every day—he thinks of a voice like shale grazing softly but with the thrilling threat of pressing harder, against his skin. Is the shepherd in his head, too?

Dean’s mouth hangs limply. He nods. Words are ash or—something less symbolic of destruction but certainly no more useful. How does Novak spin gold out of simplicity?

_Am I in your head, too, Mr Winchester?_

Dean nods, breathless, heart snagging in his chest.

Why does it snag? There’s a name for this feeling, he’s sure of it, different to the resentment which pierced their early interactions.

“Just so,” he finds the words unfolding in his mouth, and they’re the shepherd’s words, the words Castiel has forming at his lips more often than any other. The shepherd’s eyes dance.

“Just so,” he repeats, and hums in agreement. “Just so.”

The moment dances dream-like around them. And if this _were_ a dream, this would be where Dean would wake. But this isn’t a dream. And Castiel takes one of Dean’s hands in the water, running his own over it, and up to the wrist, and up to the forearm, grip gentle—Dean isn’t used to being touched like this, like he’s worth softness, and not a battered tool to hang up when he’s finished with, or worse, thrown out completely at the day’s end.

No, instead, the shepherd’s hands move up and down his arms, cleaning them softly by hand, not even with a cloth. Castiel stares intently at Dean’s skin, Dean is fascinated by the quiet intensity of the man’s gaze, something hot clamps over his insides to know that _he_ is the subject of that instensity.

No words, only this. Nothing else, only this.

Only this: Novak’s hands moving over Dean’s skin like warm wind over long summer grass. When Novak looks up, Dean is confused by the prickle of tears at his eyes, prompted by the touch, the newness of it, that Castiel thinks Dean worth touching with kindness, that _anyone_ could—

“Would you like me to stop?” Novak asks, concerned at Dean’s expression. Wordlessly, mouth open, Dean shakes his head. Then he manages,

“Yes,” and the shepherd falters, looking hurt, but Dean takes Castiel’s hands and begins to clean them, just as Castiel did for him, and the shepherd doesn’t seem as startled as Dean felt moments ago, but certainly something new takes over his expression. Dean cleans the hands, surprised at how glad he feels to have an excuse to touch these knuckles—he takes the opportunity to examine them more closely than he has been able to yet, fascinated though he’s been by their movements as they work. He grazes his thumb between each valley between them and pretends it’s to remove the day’s dirt. Does the shepherd know this isn’t his reason? His gaze is upon Dean’s face as he works, intense and certain as a summer storm, as high wind against the thin panes of a window.

He cleans up to the wrist, then up to the forearm, fascinated by the soft skin and hard muscle beneath the caress of his hands. Novak’s gaze does not leave his face. Once the shepherd’s wrists and forearms are cleaned, Dean moves down to the man’s hands again and cleans every finger, running his thumb over them, turning Castiel’s hands over to clean his palms and thinking of the cold outline of trees against a winter sky in the fine lines that twist thinly against each palm.

He’s disappointed when they’re definitely, undeniably clean. He nearly removes himself, nearly only removes himself, but instead does something he can hardly understand. Folding the fingers of Castiel’s right hand over the shepherd’s palm, he brings the knuckles up, still holding tight to Novak’s fingers, and brings the shepherd’s hand up to his face, Castiel’s knuckles just beneath the tip of his nose. He doesn’t know why he does this. He doesn’t know why he wants to.

The shepherd’s gaze is still on him like lightning striking the sea.

He inhales. He breathes in deep, through his nose, which all but rests on the shepherd’s knuckles. Winter spices—anise and cloves and cinnamon—and there, there it is, the unfurling, grounding, sleepy yet bright smell of lavender seeds, a smell like the sound of warm wind through grass.

And still the shepherd’s gaze is upon him. And still Dean holds it.

“Lavender,” he smiles, the expression twitching at his features, and it twitches at Novak’s too, though he looks at Dean like he’s some odd and unknowable creature. “Smells like lavender.”

“Well there’s a surprise,” the man quips, and Dean sighs a laugh, and squints sarcastically at Castiel. “I wonder if yours will smell the same?” He asks, and Dean’s chest clamps strangely, and he breathes,

“Find out,” and doesn’t know why he does this, doesn’t know why he wants Castiel to dare, and Castiel brings Dean’s hand to _his_ nose, and inhales, and keeps his gaze upon Dean as he breathes in long and deep, the tip of his nose grazing Dean’s knuckles.

“Lavender,” he says, and his eyes are soft. Dean’s throat is tight.

“Oh,” he says, as if it’s a surprise. His heart clamours in his throat. Has the shepherd taken a step closer to him? He feels closer. The walls feel closer. And the rest of the world feels further away.

“Will you be staying for dinner, Mr Winchester?” The shepherd asks, and Dean opens his mouth and has to breathe before he answers.

“Yes, if you’ll have me,” he confirms. It’s self-conscious and worried, _he’s_ self-consious and worried.

“I’ll always have you,” Castiel answers, eyes like two blue fires against Dean’s skin. Dean has to laugh because something like fear flashes through him at the thought of _not_ laughing.

“You’ll regret that offer, soon enough,” he promises, but the shepherd doesn’t quip anything back. He simply shakes his head with firm and gentle and solemn certainty, certainty like the stretch of muscles Dean was running his fingers along just minutes ago.

“I don’t think I will.”

Dean swallows.

“Then let me help, at least,” he manages to grate out. The shepherd chuckles, and shakes his head.

“All these lessons I’ve given you, Dean, I think it’s time I let you take the _lead.”_

Dean lets out a breathless laugh. He doesn’t offer a droll reply, like he normally would. Instead he finds himself confessing,

“I like it when you call me Dean.”

The shepherd looks, only looks, for a moment. A soft line pinches his brows together and Dean worries in a flash of background fear that he’s placed a foot wrong, that this was the wrong kind of extension of vulnerability.

“I’ll be sure to say your name often, then.”

Dean trembles.

He cannot name this feeling.

He doesn’t understand this feeling.

He doesn’t want to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so twelfth night is a really cool play which creates these knots of gender and attraction (protagonist viola dresses up as a man and falls in love for the man she works for, who sends viola to woo the woman he loves, olivia, for him. olivia falls in love with viola dressed as a man, and mistakes her twin sebastian for viola and gets with HIM instead. sebastian has a male friend called antonio who, im not gonna lie, seems to be VERY in love with sebastian. the play ends up with this tangled knot of identity revelations and im not gonna lie, some really strange implications about love and gender. performing the play in the present day is this really strange exercise because olivia's love for viola, even if she thinks viola is a man, becomes this really tender and beautiful thing. how do we unpack a play like that? all im saying is maybe Cas picked out twelfth night for dean because he associates the play with knots of gender, love, and attraction. all im saying.
> 
> also yes twelfth night is the play she's the man is based off.


	10. Warblers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I'd try to get this in before - well. y'know.
> 
> SO weird.
> 
> Not really sure how to mark this. It feels eventful - I hope you're all feeling okay, all surrounded by grounding things, etc. I hope this admittedly VERY soft bit of deancas acts as a balm for whatever you've been feeling this week. Love to you all.

With the beginning of a new year, new lessons begin, too. They tread slowly through _Twelfth Night—_ or, Dean treads slowly through it, in the flickering glow of orange and amber candlelight in the croft. The croft, that small and rugged building, is where Dean spends more and more of his time in—until almost the only hours he is in the farmhouse are those he spends in sleep.

Castiel gives Dean a pencil and notebook to practice all his writing in, makes him copy out sentences of Shakespeare and modernise the spelling. It gives Dean a headache: often he grows angry or at the very least frustrated with the shepherd and snaps out sharp responses to Castiel’s gentle suggestions of help. Some evenings this obviously wears thin on the man’s patience: his response to Dean’s snarls will no longer be a longsuffering blink and head-incline, but a growl or glare which makes Dean’s insides wrench up.

Dean’s faltering tongue stumbles over the shapes crammed on the pages of Novak’s book, the book Novak gifted to him. Starting out his reading lessons with _Shakespeare_ feels rude and unfair of the shepherd, but Castiel doesn’t seem to agree. As with everything, the shepherd is steady, patient, in these lessons. Like the earth. Novak points out, repeatedly, that as a man of the soil himself, Dean ought to know the inherent patience and trust in the act of planting a seed, smoothing soil over it, and waiting. Slowly, Dean’s hand falters less over each letter he mimics in his notebook, slowly he feels less as though he is uneasily drawing them out, copying their shapes, but is rather transferring from one book to another some meaning, like two rivers meeting and deepening, or a stream branching and parting.

They finish the play in about three weeks. Dean’s favourite part is when Castiel sings him one of the songs in the play, a version his mother always used to sing to him.

_O mistress mine, where are you roaming?  
O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,  
That can sing both high and low:  
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;  
Journeys end in lovers meeting,  
Every wise man's son doth know._

“Journeys end in lovers meeting,” Dean twitches a smile, and finds himself looking up from the page to gaze at Cas, when he reads this line. “I like that.”

“As do I,” the shepherd smiles, eyes twinkling.

“He’s okay, this Shakespeare fella.”

Castiel chuckles, warm, leaning back in his chair a moment. They sit in the croft, at the table, at the corner closest to the fire.

“Praise indeed. I’m sure he’d be touched by that glowing review.”

“He’d shake my hand.”

“Not unless you cleaned your nails, first.”

“Cas,” Dean laughs, shoving the shepherd softly.

“I’m not joking,” the shepherd says earnestly, but his eyes dance like firelight, “you’re filthy.”

“Cas,” Dean laughs again. His hand hasn’t left the shepherd’s shoulder, from where it rested, at his playful push.

He does this increasingly. Calls the man Cas. It’s easier to shout across a field in the early mornings as greeting. It’s faster to say when asking for help or to be reminded of how to prepare and cook food for their meals together. It makes them feel closer together in the low firelight when Castiel is leaning over the book with Dean, helping him walk out sentences like the rising of the sun.

It makes him feel… It makes Dean feel… It makes Dean feel…

Castiel is a polymath. A strange kind of new old polymath familiar with everything unconventional and mystical, with the magic of sky and soil as well as the high words of Shakespeare and Keats. And he shares it, he shares all of it, with Dean. Abundant as the ground.

They continue to trade secrets over their dinners, Cas even more reluctant than Dean to share them but—but reluctant isn’t the right word. There’s no resentment in their sharing. Only… Only it’s hard. Unstitching secrets from the seam of your heart is hard. Both of them know this. Both of them are patient.

Dean never knew he could be so patient.

And so their evenings are a slow unstitching, restitching. Where do they restitch? They seem to unweave themselves from the hurt of their own lives—reluctant secret by reluctant secret—and re-bind themselves to one another. Trust is an act of entwining. The two are bound together by what they share, but _bound_ is harsh, and this is soft and often trembling, always hopeful, looking up across the brief space of the table at the dropping of a new secret with the fear that it will be met with rejection. But it never is. The secrets range and roam in size and seeming significance: Novak’s father had dark hair, his mother light. Dean’s were the same. Castiel thinks the most beautiful sound is that of animals lowing in the evening as they push hard muscle and hide against one another to drink together during the setting of the sun. Dean thinks the most beautiful sound is the sound of a lover’s soft breathing in sleep. Novak smiles with sparking eyes and says, perhaps, Dean is right. Dean says he’s slowly starting to appreciate the sound of Madra’s breathing as she drifts off to sleep in the evenings. Castiel laughs warmly.

“There’s little better,” he nods, “than the sound of sleep from a contented working dog.”

“And it’s funny when she has dreams,” Dean grins. Cas smiles, reluctant and amused, and nods.

“Even in sleep, she likes to herd her sheep.”

Dean snorts, shaking his head affectionately.

“You speak of animals in an awfully funny way.”

“You _live_ with Mr Singer,” Castiel points out. Dean barks out a laugh and concedes this point.

Through their treading out of _Twelfth Night,_ the shepherd is teaching him more than just to read. More than to look at and understand the magic of plants. More than to shepherd. Dean’s chest unfolds like a flower in spring. Even if they are yet mired in the depths of winter.

After _Twelfth Night_ they read Blake and Castiel makes funny exclamations of agreement at moments and lines he seems particularly struck by. He makes Dean memorise _Ah! Sun-flower_ and recite it at odd intervals of their days; when they’re cresting the hill and watching the sun glint over its peak. The shepherd seems to like the poem so much that Dean begins greeting him that way, _“Ah, Sunflower!”_ replacing an ordinary “Good morning”. Castiel is taken aback at first, which only makes Dean like it more, and like teasing him with it more. He sings the song from _Twelfth Night_ while the two of them work, when Castiel starts wandering off somewhere will call after him _O mistress mine, where are you roaming?_ Which, without fail, makes the shepherd laugh one of his rare, rich laughs, full-bodied as wine in winter, and turn to Dean to give him some foul informal gesture which, once upon a time, Dean wouldn’t have believed Mr Novak capable of. When Dean skids on the muddy, slippery and uneven ground of the chilly English season, Castiel will recite _Trip no further pretty sweeting_ and Dean will either laugh or scowl, depending on his mood, but always also depend on the shepherd’s oak-tree arms to catch him before he hits the damp and frosted earth.

And both of them, as they greet each other each morning, or during the evenings where Dean joins Castiel for lessons and dinner, or when the shepherd joins them on Sundays for a big and indulgent meal, will joke, as though they are trying to beat the other to it, _Journeys end in lovers meeting._

It makes Dean smile. Late at night, lying back in his bed, with the sound of the sea lapping at the cliffs in the distance, the light of his room turning blue in the dusk, it makes Dean smile to think on.

Winter tightens its grip on the new year. Frost turns the grass brittle and snaps it underfoot, turns it a glowing and luminous shade of the meeting point of blue-gray-green. Snow begins to drift down on the interval between the New Year and Dean’s birthday, and one day out in the fields with snow clinging to his intriguing charcoal eyelashes, Castiel frowns at Dean’s shivering frame, the way he has hauled his coat around himself.

“You ought to get something better than a sackcoat for these cold months,” the shepherd frowns, all gentle concern, but Dean scowls at it. “Especially if you intend to keep spending all your time out here in the frost and snow, not to speak of the wind off the sea.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Dean growls. “And I’d wear a warm coat if I _could._ This is the only one I have.”

“Your brothers have good coats,” the shepherd points out, and something in Dean’s jaw twitches.

“I know,” he grumbles, indignant. _“I’m_ the one who got Sammy his. And John bought Adam his great, big, fancy thing—” he cuts himself off and swallows. He tries, increasingly he tries, not to speak bitterly of his half-brother— _brother—_ in front of the shepherd. And not in front of the shepherd. Just in general.

“Well, that seems awful negligent of him,” the shepherd frowns softly, troubled, and Dean nearly snarls.

“It’s fine—I’m not a _child—”_

“I never said you were.”

“—And anyway, winters in Kansas aren’t like _this.”_ Dean shifts his snarl of gaze from Castiel to the sky. The shepherd’s eyes twinkle. His steadfast patience with Dean… One day will he tire? One day will he grow tired? “I haven’t needed one, before, not like _this…”_ He trails off, grimly, huddling into himself once again within the baggy confines of his sackcoat. The shepherd watches him thoughtful, obviously troubled. “What are you thinking about?” Dean asks with a scowl.

Novak looks away, blinking tiredly.

“Nothing,” he shakes his head. “Nothing for you to worry over.”

Dean discovers on the morning of his birthday. Ellen has cooked some great feast of a breakfast and of course, the shepherd is invited to join them. Dean has refused to take this day off work—it’s just as any other, and he hasn’t _celebrated_ a birthday since before he was twelve years old—but Ellen and Bobby are both insistent on making an occasion of this. He and Cas are due to begin work shortly afterwards, but he’s caught up in a surprise of gifts which he is—he doesn’t want to admit—incredibly touched by. But Novak, however hurtfully, slips out of the room during this time. Dean frowns sadly at the doorway he has just taken his absence through—Sam catches this look, and Dean glares at him in silent answer to his raised, concerned eyebrows. They finish up their breakfast—Dean thanks Ellen warmly and sincerely but is still distracted and disheartened by the shepherd’s leave-taking—and Dean picks up his gifts to put in his room: tobacco, from Bobby, and a fine and slender pipe to smoke it from; a hand-made hat from Ellen to keep him warm, and an hand-embroidered handkerchief from her, as well; a new deck of cards from Adam with bright eyes and a hopeful _so perhaps, later today, we can play together?;_ and a deep red leather bound notebook from Sam, who must have noticed Dean slowly tracking out words in the one Castiel gave him, and has assumed Dean has taken up a new passion for journaling.

He meets the shepherd as he walks up the stairs, gifts cradled in his arms. The shepherd is descending them.

“What are you doing?” Dean frowns. “Where are you going?”

“To stand in wait for you, by the door,” Castiel answers, and Dean’s expression twitches further, distrusting.

“And where have you come from?”

“Errand,” is all the shepherd answers, and brushes past Dean, toward the front door. Dean scowls again. Sometimes, he and Novak still have days like this: days where Dean can’t understand the shepherd, or the swirl Novak sets in his gut, or both. He turns sullen and frustrated, disliking the storm within him, disliking the perfect storm of Castiel’s eyes. Is today going to be one of those days? He sighs to himself as he climbs the stairs. He hopes not. Being sullen with Cas isn’t as fun as it used to be—or perhaps only seem. Yet sometimes Dean is made to feel so frozen in his ways he doesn’t know what else to do. But when he rounds off the stairs and enters into his bedroom, his heart falters in his chest.

Lying on his bed. Folded with sympathetic and intentional care. A black-green greatcoat. Thick as Dean’s finger is and _new._ How much did the shepherd spend on this? Too much, surely too much—Dean’s eyes cloud, he drops his other gifts onto his bed and picks the item up with slow and reverent care—this must be the most expensive thing he’s ever owned: surely, _surely—_ and surely he isn’t worthy of such a thing, such a _gift._ How could he ever be? Not for the first time, and he suspects, or perhaps he hopes, not for the last, he is overwhelmed by the sympathy and acute, perceptive thoughtfulness of the man who has chosen to sit with all Dean’s anger and resentment for _months,_ now. Even on his good days, Dean has never felt worth dwelling with. He holds it up to the light. Its buttons shined, bright and proud and polished. He shakes his head. No, he is not worth this.

“Mr Winchester,” a deep and rich and rough, indeed a musical voice sounds behind him, from the door. He turns to face it, and its source. “I,” Castiel looks nervous—more nervous than Dean has yet had the pleasure of seeing him. Strange, that Dean likes the faltering expression, glittering with worry, which veils the shepherd’s features, now. “—I feared, as you were taking some time—”

“You gave this to me,” Dean holds up the coat to him, and Castiel looks self conscious.

“I’ll admit, it affected me sorely, seeing you shivering and shuddering through the cold…”

“You _gave_ this to me,” Dean repeats, shoulders slumping even as his chest fills with unknowable heat. “Why?”

“I’ve said…”

“It must have cost you,” Dean tries, and runs a hand worriedly through his hair. The shepherd looks self-conscious, apologetic. Anxious. His face is a knot with it. Dean would like to untangle it. “It’s _new._ It’s _shining_ and new. It must have cost you… Months— _months’_ wages—”

“I have not so many calls for money…”

“You feed me, almost every night,” Dean worries, something tangled in his chest, “and teach me, every day— _everything,_ your trade, about plants and trees, how to read and write—and now you buy me a coat which _clearly—”_

“You are more than a worthy recipient.”

“Don’t _say_ that,” Dean bites out, and is surprised by the tears in his eyes. Castiel steps forward into the room.

“So it’s not that you dislike it…”

 _“Dislike_ it?” Dean repeats, brows sloped. “No, no…”

“Then,” Cas takes a step closer to him. “Won’t you at least try it on?”

“Cas, I can’t accept this.”

“I have everything I need,” the shepherd shrugs carelessly, as if guessing Dean’s anxiety. “Let me do this, for you.”

“I can buy _myself_ a coat—”

“Aye, but you won’t,” Cas points out. “You’ll buy a new pair of boots for your brother, Samuel, first. And then some small pet, to keep Adam occupied, during these lonely weeks of winter. And then a new sewing box, for Ellen. And then new bird cages for Bobby, to sustain his ridiculous hobby,” Dean huffs a laugh at this, as Castiel speaks, and the shepherd’s features flick upwards, affectionately. “I know you, Dean,” he says simply. It’s the truth, he says it as though it is, and all the evidence, all his words and gentleness with Dean would seem to confirm it. “I know you. Let me do this, for you.”

Dean’s chest pangs.

“Okay,” he nods. Then, and from the very soil of his soul, “Thank you. Thank you, Cas.”

“And many times yet,” the shepherd smiles, “I’d do the same.”

Dean swallows, throat tight, and shakes his head.

“The world isn’t worthy of you. All the world.”

“Stop your nonsense.”

“I will not.”

“Even my _father_ wouldn’t buy me a coat.”

“That says little about the coat, and more about your father.”

“Put it on, for me?” Dean asks, instead of rising to this. He doesn’t know why the thought of the shepherd helping him slip this item on, thread his arms through its arms, lay it softly over his shoulders, fills him with such excitement. “Please?” Dean asks. “Put it on for me?”

Castiel swallows, brow flickering and twining. Dean worries for a moment that his request was too ridiculous, strange, absurd.

But the shepherd peers at him, all ancient intensity, and takes a step forward, stormy and precise gaze still set upon Dean like a promise. He takes the coat from Dean’s arms.

“Turn,” he says softly, and Dean trembles with the timbre of his voice. He turns. He lifts one of his arms, when it is pressed at by Cas’s fingers, a silent request. The shepherd slips Dean’s arm through the coat, and then the other. His breath is a ghost upon Dean’s neck, makes Dean’s own breath catch in his chest. Castiel smooths the thick material over Dean’s shoulders with hands that press at once hard and soft to his back. The moment lingers on the air like the scent of lavender in a small and compact room.

It is something all too sacred and all too strange to name.

Dean tries to breathe in. His mouth trembles, hanging open. He turns back to the shepherd.

“Well, now,” Castiel smiles, eyes warm and crinkled with the expression, “don’t you look the very picture of a gentleman farmer.”

“Shut up,” Dean tries to sigh the words out, but finds them struggling and cracking on their way past the column of his throat.

“I will not,” Cas shakes his head. “Remember, Winchester, who bought you this coat. Accordingly, I’ll offer you as many compliments as I like.”

Dean laughs, hoarse, warm, chest flooding with sunlight at the end of January, and tips his head forward, onto Castiel’s shoulders. He presses his forehead into the steady muscle of the man’s neck. Castiel chuckles and threads his hands through Dean’s hair.

“And here I was, worried the gift would be considered improper.”

“Improperly kind,” Dean answers. “Improperly remarkable. Just like you.”

“A compliment? For _me?”_

“It sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

Both of them laugh. Dean’s head is still pressed against the shepherd’s shoulder. Cas’s fingers still drift through his hair.

“Happy birthday, Dean.”

Dean chuckles into the man’s neck.

“It already has been.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Share, leave a comment, etc.! loads of love x


	11. Blue Jay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !! new chapter !! sorry this one took a while. I was writing two fix its for the finale lmao if you want to read them after this go for it mate.
> 
> trigger warning on this upcoming chapter(?) for homophobic violence and just like violence in general. if you want to avoid that it's towards the very end.
> 
> anyway, hope you enjoy! lots and lots of love x

The year crests even as it deepens. Snow falls heavy in February, heavier than it yet has. One Sunday after church Adam _begs_ everyone to join him in a snowball fight—and so this is what they’re doing, when Cas arrives, expecting to join them for lunch. They’re throwing snowballs out in front of the farmhouse; the geese are honking in panic and surprise and indignance when he approaches.

“Cas, get down!” Dean yells, and grins, and the shepherd only has time to frown, perplexed, before Jo has landed a snowball square in his face. Dean laughs so hard that he slips on the ice, and is on his back, still laughing, when the figure of Castiel appears in his vision.

“Hello there, stranger,” Dean beams up at him, still on his back. He tilts his head back to gain a better sight of Cas.

Madra pants excitedly at the chaos, wagging her tail and sniffing at Dean’s face. Still lying down, he fusses at her ears in greeting. If dog’s could grin, this is what she does.

Cas’s eyes are like comets above him.

“I am glad to see you putting my coat to some good use by dirtying it in a _snowball_ fight.”

“I thought you would be,” Dean grins.

“And that you found my being attacked, just now, quite so amusing.”

“Are you pissed?” Dean can’t bite down on his smile. Or the odd flare that presses through him at looking up at the shepherd. But he realises Cas purposefully holds his hands behind his back. Dean frowns. “Wait—”

But too late. Castiel drops two huge handfuls of snow onto Dean’s face—half of it ends up in his mouth, a _lot_ up his nose. It clumps into his hair and stings his eyes with cold—barks of laughter sound around him as Dean yells in surprise, then anger, rolling fast and scrubbing the snow off himself.

“Ass, I was _gonna_ invite you to be on my team!”

“After laughing at me?”

“But I’m not gonna invite you to join any more,” Dean grumbles, sitting up. “Now, you’re my sworn enemy.”

“It wouldn’t be fair if you were on the same team, anyway,” Jo approaches, though Cas looks comically wary of her, after her earlier attack.

“What?!”

“You and Adam are a team, me and Sam are a team, Castiel—you should be on a team with Mick.”

“Ordinarily I’d say I work alone,” Mick says, suddenly by Castiel’s side. Dean dislikes the grin hanging from his features, or the wink he offers the shepherd as he speaks. “But for you, I’ll make an exception.”

“Too kind,” Cas replies. Dean sets his jaw. The shepherd notices the expression. “What, Mr Winchester, are you afraid we’ll beat you?”

“No,” Dean glares, refusing the hand up which Cas offers him. “Me and Adam will _bury_ you.”

Adam’s overjoyed to be included in this statement.

“We will!” He beams.

“Fighting talk,” Cas observes, expression steady, but eyes sparking. “It’s admirable, really.”

“Completely misguided, though,” Mick shakes his head. He tugs at Cas’s arm, and a growl Dean can’t control rises from his throat. Adam tugs at Dean’s coat—the coat Castiel gave him—saying they need to discuss tactics. Dean only glares at the shepherd, who watches him with frustrating warmth as Adam pulls at his sleeves, saying he’s thought of the _best_ place to build a defensive snow fort from. Dean glowers as he’s tugged away—but Cas’s eyes on him startle him with softness.

He and Adam build the snow fort. It’s not bad at all but Dean worries that the others won’t be sensitive to Adam’s hard work and will instead take pleasure in kicking it apart. He bundles up about five dozen snowballs into a pile, ready for them to defend the fort with, at this thought.

And they start, Dean trusted to attack, Adam to defend. But really, Dean’s doing twice the legwork, on the defensive as well as attack, circling back to the fort every time it seems Adam is struggling to hold his own.

But eventually, Jo jumps out at him when he’s out of snowballs. The snow starts falling heavier and heavier, making the way ahead of him a sheet of white as his feet pummel the ground in escape. He runs around the side of the house, toward the stone block of stables. He ducks beneath the doorway of one of them as the snowfall becomes a blizzard and nearly jumps out of his skin.

“What are you doing here?” He nearly barks.

“Hiding from Miss Jo,” the shepherd answers, eyes sparking. They stand, facing each other, backs pressed to either side of the doorframe. Cas raises his hands in peacetreaty. “I’ve no ammo.”

“Oh,” Dean says, breathless from his run and now, something else. “Me too.”

There is, of course, pleanty of ammunition all about. This is the thing about snowballs during a blizzard. You only need to opportunity to make them. But something about the doorframe Dean leans against, staring at the shepherd, is far too comfortable to move from.

“She’s quite proficient with a handful of packed snow.”

“I think she laces her snowballs with small rocks,” Dean says, and he isn’t joking.

Castiel’s face lifts into a laugh, warm against the cold of the snow.

“I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“Very charitable of you.”

The shepherd shakes his head affectionately, looking away, out to the snowy expanse.

“Where’s Madra?” Dean asks.

“Oh, Sam has almost certainly stolen her for his own team.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dean laughs. “Perhaps collie’s aren’t as loyal as they’re renowned.”

“Trechary is the word.”

“Man’s best friend indeed.”

 _“Sam’s_ best friend, perhaps.”

Dean huffs out another laugh. He still finds himself breathless from running away from Jo.

“Snow’s pretty heavy,” he comments, and the shepherd blinks thoughtfully.

“That it is,” he agrees.

“And cold.”

“Being snow.”

Dean rolls his eyes. Cas’s spark, some silent acknowledgement he’s being tiresome. But Dean isn’t tired of it. Not tired of him. No.

Never.

“I suppose you’re more used to it than me,” Dean states. Cas twitches a smile.

“Snow’s not _so_ common, in these parts.”

“And what of your home in Ireland?” Dean asks.

A shadow falls over Cas’s face.

“Yes, it snowed there,” the shepherd confirms. Dean’s insides twitch anxiously at the suddenly removed tone and expression.

No trading secrets today, apparently.

“Right,” Dean nods, looking away. He rubs his hands together. His fingertips were red with cold before, but now the shade stretches across his knuckles and his palms. From where he doesn’t look, the shepherd sighs.

“You ought to be wearing gloves.”

Dean looks back at him. Cas’s face is steady, patient. There’s something concerned in the gaze but also something softly exasperated.

“You aren’t wearing any,” Dean points out.

“That’s different,” Cas says, as though this is adequate defence or rebuttal.

“And why’s that?”

“I’m used to it.”

“There’s no getting used to ice on your fingertips,” Dean says, and grins. “What if your fingers snap off?”

 _“I_ had no warning there’d be a cause to be holding and throwing snow,” Cas points out. “You did.”

“Alright,” Dean sighs, admitting defeat. He rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “You had a lot of siblings, didn’t you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re good at arguing.:

A smile presses to the shepherd’s lips.

“And you’re clearly the oldest child,” he says. “You’re not used to having to work for your victories.”

“You should’ve been a politician.”

“I think I ended up where I was meant to,” the shepherd says. Dean’s gaze flicks up to his. Cas watches him, and his eyes hit Dean like a freight train. He nearly startles back.

“Oh?” Dean asks, unsure why he feels so shocked, so at a loss. “And why’s that?”

He’s continued rubbing his hands from the cold, subconsciously all the while, and is startled when the shepherd takes them in his own, rubbing them together to warm them, before bringing them up to his mouth and breathing hot air over each finger and knuckle. Dean’s heart leaps into his throat.

“To warm these,” he answers, pressing Dean’s hands between his own and blowing warm air between them. Dean watches him, can’t stop watching him.

“Th—that’s awfully kind,” Dean stammers out. The shepherd curls a soft smile, regarding Dean. His hands still enclose Dean’s.

“I consider it no kind of burden.”

“Still,” Dean can’t seen to catch his breath from running away from Jo, though that was whole minutes ago. “It seems a waste of your many talents.”

The shepherd raises his eyebrows.

“A compliment?” He asks, surprised. Dean rolls his eyes.

“I give you plenty,” he counters.

The snow drifts down to one side of them. Cas smiles.

“They still come as a shock.”

“You’re asking for more?” Dean laughs.

“If you’re offering,” the shepherd teases. Still, his hands are wrapped around Dean’s. Dean laughs again, insides warm in spite of the blizzard.

“How’s this: your hands are warm.”

“Now that’s not a compliment,” Cas shakes his head. “You could give it to any person with a pulse.”

“Not to me,” Dean counters, nodding to his cold hands, still being warmed by Castiel. His blue eyes spark.

“Perhaps, though I’m working to amend that.”

“And it’s very charitable of you.”

“With you, I hardly count it as charity.”

“Oh?” Dean asks, blinking. “What do you count it as?”

Cas only looks at him. Steady. Pressing as the waves. Penetrating as ice. Staggering as the blue at the centre of a flame.

The moment lingers like snow on the air.

Silence. Silence, and the snow. Dean’s lips have parted, his breath clouds on the air, and he becomes, strangely, acutely conscious of the air between them.

Minutes pass with the drift of the snow. All they do is stare and still, Dean’s breath refuses to even out within his lungs.

Eventually, Cas lowers Dean’s hands, letting gently go.

“Warm?” He asks. Dean blinks dumbly. He nods. “Perhaps we ought to return to the game.”

“Right,” Dean nods. Something in his heart pangs at the loss of contact. Is he that cold, that the desire to renew it is so great? “I wonder how it’s going. I hope they haven’t done anything to Adam’s snow fort. He was proud of it.”

Castiel flickers, affectionate.

 _“I_ was proud, to see you work so hard at defending it.”

Dean’s stomach clamps.

“Proud?”

“I thought it terribly thoughtful.”

“Well,” Dean flushes, looking down. They move from the shelter of the doorframe, out into the blizzard again. “He worked hard on it. It deserved defending.”

Cas’s lips twitch, even under the shroud of snow.

“Just so,” he agrees.

They round the corner of the house, and as they do are pelted from four different angles with snowballs. Dean shouts out a curse, trying to cover his face with his forearms, but already snow is in his eyes, his ears, his hair, and even a little in his mouth.

Cas stoops down to form a snowball and aim it back, and Dean follows suit, shouting out at the hurdle of cold railed against him, laughing because Cas is laughing, too, but in the end they’re both overcome.

“Alright, alright, we surrender! What did we ever do to _you?”_

“Abandoned your posts,” Jo grins, but stays the snowball in her hand. “Which demands punishment.”

“So what,” Dean blinks out the ice in his eyes, “you all teamed up, to attack us?”

“Common enemy,” Mick grins. Dean squints at Adam.

“And what about you?” He rolls his eyes. “I thought we made a pretty good team, back there. Now I find it means nothin’ to you?”

Adam laughs, and, beaming, admits,

“We _were_ a good team.”

“I’m sure you’re trying to imply something, there—”

“You abandoned ship,” Mick grins.

“I did _not,”_ Dean protests, “I was running away from Jo’s gravel snowballs—which, by the way, were _definitely_ against the rules—”

Ellen has come outside and huffs at the sight of Dean and Castiel.

“What kind of state is _that_ to eat lunch in?”

“Ellen, it’s not _our_ fault,” Dean grins, but she rolls her eyes.

“Children,” she huffs. “The lot of you.” Mick laughs and she bites, good-natured, “don’t go thinking you’re exempt from that, Davies. Dean,” she turns back to him, “you ought to get out of those clothes, you’ll catch your death. Lend Castiel some things to wear?”

“Alright,” Dean tugs on Cas’s snow-soaked sleeve, “come on, Cas.”

They hang their coats in front of the fire before heading upstairs. Dean rummages through his drawers for something for the shepherd to wear, Castiel hangs back, stood beside Dean’s bed.

He’s used to changing in fornt of men, having worked hard labour on farms all his life. But here, for some reason, he feels nervous, a flair of panic ridging his insides. When he turns vack to the shepherd with a new shirt and trousers for him, Castiel doesn’t hesitate in stripping his soaked clothing off, but Dean’s pulse quickens in his tightening chest. He looks away, then he looks back, then he doesn’t know where to look.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Cas is muscled. Dean’s felt those arms like iron bands wrapped around him when he’s slipped on muddy slopes. Cas spends his days hauling sheep from brambles, repairing walls and gates, forging his own tools. He builds, whittles, makes, everything himself. But it’s pure and shocking to see. All this tight and compact flesh; Dean remembers how warm the hands against his were and wonders if the rest of Cas’s body feels the same. He can’t explain this strange material fascination he has with the shepherd’s body, the desire to trace the lines of his skin as though they were instructions on a map. Cas raises his eyebrows at Dean’s watchfulness. Dean flushes, retrieving himself.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, and pulls off his ice-soaked shirt.

Both of them glance at each other. Dean’s breath snags.

“Are you still cold, Dean?” Castiel asks, with a pressing and concerned frown. He’s taken a step closer.

“I’m—I’m better,” Dean stammers. “Thank you. And you?”

“I don’t feel the cold, so much.”

“No,” Dean says, quiet. The shepherd is closer still. The shirt Dean gave him to change into hangs in his hand, by his side. “Your hands were so warm.”

Cas smiles.

“They still are,” he says, and, as if to prove this, takes his right hand and curls it around the bare skin of Dean’s left shoulder. The world is robbed of air.

“Yes,” Dean blinks, in dumb agreement.

“And you had the gall to call me icy, when we first met,” Cas comments. Dean meets his gaze, huffs out a laugh. Cas’s had is still on his shoulder. The moment is like the eye of a storm. Focussed and still, with the promise of chaos only a little beyond, swirling around. But only stillness, for now.

“And you had the gall to call me hot-blooded,” Dean quips back.

“Today you proved me wrong,” Cas admits, eyes sparking. They’re closer still. Cas’s hand is still upon Dean’s shoulder, a brand, a bond. “Your hands could’ve frozen hell over.”

“And your hands could’ve…” But Dean can’t find the words. Heat is radiating off the shepherd’s body and it robs Dean of thought.

“Could’ve…?” Cas raises his eyebrows. “Care to finish that thought, Winchester?”

Dean huffs. He pulls his shirt on, face prickling. Cas’s hand is off his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he grumbles. “C’mon, get ready. Lunch is probably getting cold.”

Dean has to keep avoiding Cas’s gaze all through lunch. Something heavy has settled in the air between them, some wordless intensity to parallel the shepherd’s gaze. It doesn’t matter: Adam has plenty to say and rambles excitedly about the snow fort he and Dean built, while Dean nods encouragingly or offers a word of agreement when Adam stops to breathe or chew his food. Cas watches him during these moments with a muted smile.

After lunch, they look outside. The fields are buried in a pillow of white. The pines which spear the sky wear hats of snow.

“What about the sheep?” Dean asks, worriedly. Cas flickers his gaze affectionately to Dean. They stand at the window of the drawing room, which is frosted with cold.

“They’re in a stell,” Cas answers, “and will be warm enough. There’s little I need to do for the rest of the day, save perhaps check up on them.”

“I’ll do that with you.”

“You called them stupid animals, when we first met.”

He doesn’t say this as an accusation. Perhaps it’s a little amused, and mainly interested, in what Dean will have to say in response.

“All the more reason to look out for them.”

The shepherd rolls his sparking eyes.

“Of course.”

“Why do _you_ care for them?” Dean asks. Cas glances back over to him.

“Because I care for them,” he shrugs. “Do I need more reason than that?”

“You care for them, because you care for them,” Dean repeats, deadpan.

“Can love be untangled?” Castiel asks, turning to face Dean, face on, away from the window. “Will love submit to any untangling?”

Dean laughs.

“Perhaps not. But it has _reasons.”_

“Love is with the heart. Not the mind.”

“So you love your sheep.”

“Every shepherd ought to,” Cas says. But his expression turns dark and troubled. Dean is silenced.

In the early evening, after seeing to the sheep and wading through snow up to their shins, they sit in the croft and eat the small dinner Cas has prepared for them. In the time of their preparing, eating, and talking through this, snow has continued its drift down to sleep on the hibernating land, and the sky has darkened from purple-blue to pitch. Dean catches Castiel flickering his gaze, troubled, out the window behind him.

“It’s getting dark, huh?” He smiles, and the shepherd blinks slowly.

 _“Getting,”_ he repeats, sarcastic.

“Okay,” Dean concedes, “it _is_ dark.”

“And cold.”

“Now, I thought you didn’t feel it.”

“I wasn’t worried for me,” Castiel sighs. Dean smiles in spite of himself. He glances out the window again. “And the land is clogged with snow.”

“And what, you’re worried for the sheep?”

“I’m worried for _you.”_

“Me?”

“If you’re to walk home in it.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine.”

“Knowing your habit of slipping.”

“You won’t come to steady my feet?” Dean raises his eyebrows with a grin. Cas rolls his eyes again. “You’re in a mood, tonight,” Dean laughs.

“I’m in no mood,” Cas shakes his head, “except perhaps concern.”

“Concern,” Dean repeats, warm. His eyes are fixed on the shepherd. But Cas only frowns thoughtfully at the table for several long moments, while Dean is warmed by the word. _Concern._

Ordinarily, concern is _his_ burden. The burden he must bear on behalf of his brothers, concern for their wellbeing and whereabouts and safety, for years it was concern for John and whether he’d drink himself into a ditch or into another fight he wouldn’t scrape out of. Concern for where he would source his family’s next meal, or money for where they might rest their heads at night. Concern for his work. It’s shifted into concern for the farm, concern for Bobby’s health, concern for Adam’s happiness and that he can sustain a childhood Dean was never allowed.

But who’s concerned for _him?_

Cas.

As if on cue, the shepherd speaks.

“Of course, you’d be welcome to stay here, the night.”

Dean blinks.

“On account of the cold, and the snow,” the shepherd continues. Dean nods dumbly, skin of his heart peeling.

“On account of concern for me,” Dean corrects, smiling.

The shepherd sighs.

“I suppose.”

“Where would I sleep?”

“On the floor, and you’ll be grateful.”

Dean leans back, laughing.

_“Cas.”_

“You could share my bed,” the shepherd sighs, mock-grudgingly.

“It’d be terribly cramped.”

“And what, you’re too good for that?”

“I’ve slept on floors, in the past,” Dean leans forward again, defensive. “I’d be happy on the floor, let alone sharing a small bed. I was just checking _you’d_ be happy with that arrangement.”

“I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t.”

“Well, then.”

“Your answer?”

“I’ll stay,” Dean smiles. “It’ll save the cold walk over here, tomorrow morning.”

“And perhaps you can make me breakfast.”

 _“Me?”_ Dean repeats, indignant, grinning. “I’m your guest!”

“Now, you spend far too much time here, to be counted a guest.”

“And what will you count me as?”

“A squatter?” Cas squints. “Perhaps I ought to charge you rent.”

“Room and board,” Dean snorts. Cas’s eyes flame with amusement.

“Just so.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Perhaps not.”

Dean gets up to clear away their plates.

“Well, perhaps I _will_ make you breakfast. And dazzle you completely.”

“I look forward to it.”

Cas heats some water and pours it over a handful of lemonbalm to make a tea. They sit at the table, no longer opposite one another as they usually sit, but at the corner, adjacent to each other, knees pressed together.

“Perhaps soon we ought to go fishing.”

“Or collect mussels,” Dean says. “Have you seen them on the rocks, below the cliffs?”

“Swarms of them.”

“Let’s do both.”

“Something to warm us, these cold months.”

“Something aside from your overworked hands.”

“Or your hot blood.”

Dean snorts.

“Once I’m as well read as you, my tongue will be just as fast. Watch out.”

“You’re tongue’s already quick,” Cas shakes his head. “You’re a match enough, as it is.”

“You’re not used to people disagreeing with you?”

“I’m hardly used to _people.”_

“But your family is so big.”

“Was,” Cas corrects, face settling into something momentarily heavy, and Dean’s own features fall.

“Right,” he says. “Sorry.”

He glances at the shepherd. He wonders, again, what paths the man’s past has tracked and how they led him here. But for all their small trading of secrets in dark candlelight over food picked from the fringes of bushes and hedges, Castiel has yet to plough his heart and heave this part of it up from the turned soil for harvest. Not for Dean. Not even for Dean.

“The hour’s growing late,” Cas says, and Dean swallows, nodding.

“Would you like me to—”

“I’ve one spare nightshirt,” Cas informs him. His gaze flickers over to his small set of drawers. “You’ll find it in the first of those.”

“Th—thank you,” Dean stammers out. He drinks the last of his tea, gets up, and gets changed. The heat from Cas’s body comes to press in behind him.

“Which side would you prefer to sleep on?” Cas asks. Dean turns and is startled by how close they stand. He’s already changed.

“I—” he fumbles, “I don’t mind. Which would you—”

Cas climbs into bed, the side of the window. There is little over the space of one body left to his side.

“This side will be colder,” he says. “I’ll take it, and shield you from it.”

Dean’s heart pangs.

“Do you ever tire of it?” He asks, and Cas frowns up at him, nonplussed.

“Tire of what?”

“Being kind,” Dean says, and slips into the bed beside Castiel. He’s turned on his side to face Cas. Their faces are inches apart. “Don’t you ever tire of it?”

Cas’s features twitch. His eyes soften, like the curl of flames in a hearth.

“Not with you.”

Dean’s heart hurts.

“You ought to.”

“I can’t.”

Dean’s chest is collapsing like a dying star.

“I don’t think I’m worthy of that.”

Cas is on his side, facing him.

“I disagree.”

“Why?”

“I told you, today,” the shepherd replies simply. The darkness between them is elating.

“What?”

“Love will not submit to untangling. Love is with the heart. Not the mind.”

“You were talking of your sheep, then.”

“And now I’m talking of you.”

Dean huffs, amused and exasperated and—afraid.

“So you see me as one of your sheep.”

Cas’s mouth twitches, entertained at the thought.

“No. For all your stubbornness, you’re more like a goat.”

“A _goat?”_ Dean’s limbs curl with laughter in the small space of the bed, pressing closer against Castiel.

“Oh, almost certainly,” Cas confirms, nodding seriously. “You think another animal would suit you better?”

“Yes,” Dean confirms. “A _human.”_

“You’re not playing the game right, Winchester.”

“This is a _game?”_

“It is now,” Cas nods. “What animal am I?”

“An ass,” Dean answers quickly. “Or a mule. For all _your_ stubbornness.”

Cas chuckles warmly.

“You sound bitter, Dean.”

His name on the shepherd’s lips, in the satin darkness, in the small space between their faces, is a pretty and perfect kind of sound.

“Fine,” Dean rolls his eyes. “Then, a dog.”

“A dog?”

“For all your steadfast loyalty.”

“Well, now I feel rude, for calling you a goat.”

“Good,” Dean laughs. Cas does, too.

“Is that who I am to you?” He asks, softly.

“Huh?”

“Loyal. Is that how you see me?”

Dean blinks, confused.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Cas’s voice is velvet in the dim ether

“And who am I, to you?” Dean asks. Cas smiles. The whites of his eyes shine, pale, like moonlight on snow. Warm fingers curl around Dean’s arm in the dark.

“I don’t know,” he confesses, and Dean’s heart is deflated, disappointed.

“You don’t know?” He repeats, biting on his hurt. His voice cracks.

“I cannot unpick you.”

“You seem to understand me better than anyone,” Dean counters, and is pricked by the fact that Cas doesn’t seem to think so or agree. Cas’s voice is soft as the night.

“There is yet some kind of wonder about you, Dean Winchester.”

Dean swallows. Blinks at the stinging of his eyes.

“Wonder?” Dean repeats. “At _me?”_

Cas smiles. His eyes are two soft fires in the hearth of his face. Enough to warm any wintry night.

“Just so.”

Dean swallows. He moves his left hand over Cas’s in the darkness, the hand which is curled around his arm.

He drifts into sleep like snow drifting down from heaven.

At first, he dreams of saltwater and snow. The chill of ice clumped in his hair. The heat of a body behind him and fingers warm at his elbow, steadying him on mud-slippery earth.

Then his dreaming changes. It presses itself down into the muddied ethanol-dregs of a sleeping mind, not Dean’s mind in sleep, but the mind he puts to sleep each waking moment. The mind he is so used to laying to rest at the bottom of the lake of his consciousness that, rotting down there, he’d almost forgotten about it. He _had_ forgotten about it.

Sleeping, now, he remembers.

Remembers drinking and drinking with his desires so that, when he saw the face of a young man, Lee Webb, at the door of a bar, and that easy smile swimming through the mists of Dean’s drunken mind, it didn’t seem so ridiculous that the two of them should end up caught up in kisses behind the tavern, pressed against its walls. But caught up in kisses, they had been caught themselves.

Behind the tavern it was dark. Behind the tavern it reeked of piss and this is where men who had gone no doubt to direct _their_ piss came instead to direct their rage. Behind the tavern it was dark so luckily the men, although able to make out the nature of Dean’s embrace, couldn’t make out Dean’s face. They almost broke it in, anyway.

And Lee—Lee Webb had shouted that it was Dean, Dean’s fault, that Dean had jumped him while he’d been trying to piss— _bullshit,_ and any idiot would know this in an instant by the fact Lee’s trousers weren’t down, his belt was still buckled. So what, he’d just been pissing, fully clothed? _Lee_ had been the one to spark his eyes at Dean, follow Dean outside when drunken, Dean had stepped out for cleaner air than the smoke-heavy atmosphere of the tavern. And Lee had followed out and said _you look new,_ and when Dean had said, _because I am,_ had said _then let me welcome you properly?_

 _Lee_ had been the one to lead Dean behind the tavern and tell him not to worry, they’d hear if anyone was coming. Perhaps they would have, if they’d only been talking. But both of them distracted the other, so that all they heard was the heady and all-absorbing sound of breath against lips.

Behind the tavern it was dark. Behind the tavern it reeked of piss and this was the piss Dean had his face pressed into as men, furious at the audacity of difference, the defilement implicit in treating a man the way one might treat a woman, kicked and spat and aimed blows as Lee ran into the deeper darkness. A kick had landed Dean’s stomach that winded him, curled him over himself, and he would’ve been beaten to death, perhaps left to rot there until the morning when some poor serving girl, going about her chores, would be the unfortunate soul to have to stumble across his corpse, defiled and desecrated because of the accusation of Dean’s own abomination.

John would guess what had happened. This is what rang in Dean’s head as curses and kicks and words as foul as rot rang around him. John would guess what had happened, and why, and would spit on Dean’s name and would not shed a tear.

Dean had dared to stray in his love for Cassie and would have strayed again in his lust for Lee, for any man, and which would be the bigger offense?

Cassie was the one who would have suffered for Dean’s love for her and this is what made leaving her easier, was the one comfort: protection. But Dean would suffer and be forced to submit to suffering for the embrace of another man. There’s no crime, no abomination, like daring to desire a man the way men dare to debase women. And John would guess what had happened.

Perhaps this is what lurched Dean’s body into a roll as another kick, a hundredth kick, was aimed at his bruised frame. He gagged as he ran, legs both limping so that his gait was itself a kind of lurch, the men shouting behind him, as his gasping breath beat against his chest which was nearly crumpled from its battering. He gagged and gagged as he ran because his gut was in upheaval from the blows landed to it and when, finally, he had escaped their drunken feet, in more ways than one, he leant against the outhouse of a stranger’s home and puked, and puked, and puked. His body convulsed. He limped home and collapsed and his eyes were so swollen the next morning he could barely see.

He’d told his father he’d been drunk and gotten into a fight. John had hardly cared and luckily had himself been so drunk, on his own, that night that he didn’t make it to that particular bar until several days later, when the news had blown over and the men, who’d been half drunk out of their minds at the time of nearly beating Dean to death, had half-forgotten why they’d done the beating in the first place, and the fact that the person they beat had escaped, alive.

Sammy was harder to convince. Dean’s broken ribs and torn lip couldn’t be explained away to _him_ by a tousle in town. Eventually, he dropped it. And Dean’s brainfog—from how drunk he was, from the blows to his head, from time and from trauma, graciously set it like a wax seal over a letter containing news of death. Dean never opened it. He forgot. He let himself forget. He let himself believe it was because of whatever excuse he gave John and Sam, that he was nearly killed. He never made the mistake of opening his heart to intimacy, or vulnerability, again. Not in that way. Not with other—

That was just after Cassie. He’d been heartbroken. That’s why he’d let the simmer of Lee’s expression sing to him. He doesn’t remember much about that time. His mind won’t let him. It cages itself up when he tries, and has relinquished other memories into ash and dust. Dean doesn’t know what else he’s lost to the tides of his own mind.

What would Cas think of him, if he knew all this? All that care would be transformed into disgust. Surely.

Dean awakes with Cas’s body pressed behind his own.

Arms, and now he knows what they look like, bare, are bound across his chest. He remembers shivering in the night and how hands pulled the thick, coarse blanket more fully over him, before smoothing over his skin and raising whatever the opposite of pinpricks must be. He remembers hot breath huffed against his neck and he remembers leaning back into it. He remembers the ghost of a smile against his skin. He remembers sighing in happy half sleep, half wakefulness. He tries not to remember what happened to him because of Lee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)) snowball fight and warm hands. nice.
> 
> blue jays are symbols of loyalty. dean deserves more of that. i think cas might just give it to him:)
> 
> spoiler alert for next chapter (!!) but yeah chapter 12 is gonna be where dean FINALLY realises he's in love with cas. lmao clueless much.
> 
> stay safe friends <3


	12. Collared Dove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big chapter ahead! i have very little to say ahead of it apart from, enjoy?

“Are you awake?” Cas asks, words grazing the edge of Dean’s ear. He can obviously hear the ticking of Dean’s thoughts or see the clamp of his jaw. Dean turns in the small space of the bed to face Castiel. Cas’s arm, which had been looped over him, shifts to accommodate this move, but stays over Dean.

“I am,” Dean answers. Behind Cas, dawn peeps at the window, an orange, nebulous glow like embers of a fire. But Dean’s eyes aren’t on it. They’re on Cas. “And so are you.”

“I am.”

Dean nods, distracted and worried. The croft is closer to the sea than the Eyrie, almost right beside it; salt spray turns the mornings here misty with brine and wind. Faintly, in the cool morning air, the scent of this carries.

“You were shivering in the night,” Cas comments. So this is what his voice sounds like, roughened with sleep, when he has just awoken. Like the crumble of chalk cliffs.

“I was?” Dean asks, distracted.

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” Dean smiles, blinking. “I—I,” he doesn’t know what he’s trying to say, nor what he ought to say. “I… I was grateful for you, there to warm me through it all.”

“You noticed?”

“And was thankful,” Dean confirms. “Never—I have never—nobody has regarded me with so much care.”

Cas’s eyes turn sad.

“That’s some great discrepancy, on their part.”

Dean raises his eyebrows, confused, at this.

“Huh?”

“I cannot imagine _not_ regarding you with care,” Cas answers, simply.

“That’s not true,” Dean laughs, flush. “You thought me a nuisance, when we first met.”

Their faces are inches apart. In the bed, it is warm. But the air is cold. Cas’s eyes are two bright fires of ice.

“Oh, I still think you a nuisance,” Cas answers seriously. Dean laughs and, still lying, pushes Castiel softly. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“I’ll pray that remains the case.”

“My regard is a silly thing to waste your prayers over.”

“I disagree completely,” Dean laughs. “Your regard is very important to me.”

Cas blinks slowly, eyes washed with affection.

“It’s still silly to waste your prayers over it.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s going nowhere,” Cas answers simply, certainly. “It never will. Would you pray for the seasons to continue to turn? Some things are certain. Some things are sure.”

Dean’s heart trills.

“How did you sleep?” He asks.

“Alright, considering.”

“Considering?” Dean repeats.

“Considering you nearly shuddered the bed across the floor, with the force of all your shivering.”

“Cas,” Dean laughs, and pushes him softly again. “I wasn’t so bad, was I?” He asks, worried.

“No, your shivering was fine,” Cas says, fairly. His eyes glow. “It was your _snoring,_ which kept me up.”

“Cas!” Dean grins. “You’re not funny!”

“Oh, you think I’m joking? That’s unfortunate.”

“Do I _really?”_ Dean asks. Castiel chuckles. His hand, curled around Dean’s arm, squeezes softly. Cas strokes him with his thumb.

“No,” he says softly. “I was teasing.”

“Ass,” Dean rolls his eyes.

Castiel’s eyes spark. Neither speak for a moment. Cas sighs.

“Well, I suppose the day is calling us,” he says, and bracingly squeezes Dean’s arm again.

“I wish it’d stop,” Dean says. Castiel hums.

“I believe you promised me breakfast?” He asks. Dean snorts, incredulous.

“And you haven’t forgotten it.”

“You promised to dazzle me,” Cas says, and sits up in the bed. “How could I?”

“Don’t hold me to that promise,” Dean sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He stretches, toes curling off the cold floor.

“I’ll get the fire going.” Cas is smiling softly when Dean glances back at him. He’s noticed the tightening of Dean’s limbs in response to the chill outside of the bed.

“I’ve yet to get used to cold English weather,” Dean says, and Cas snorts.

“If you were ever to visit Kerry,” he shakes his head, rolling his eyes. Dean watches him.

“Perhaps you ought to take me,” he says, on wild impulse. Cas’s eyes emanate something suddenly sad, and a distance grows in his gaze. “You wouldn’t want to?” Dean asks, heart pricked with disappointment.

“The place is not without its ghosts,” Cas says, and looks at Dean in some kind of tender apology. Dean swallows.

“And nothing will amend that,” he points out, “except perhaps filling it with some living memories.”

Cas smiles reluctantly.

“And when did you become such a wise thing?”

“Since I started spending time with you,” Dean answers. Cas blinks warmly. He tosses Dean a pair of thick, woollen socks.

“Here,” he says. “For your poor, cold feet.”

Dean laughs appreciatively and pulls them on.

“They’re warmer already.”

Cas hums. His lashes are tight around his eyes with affection. His palm comes to rest on Dean’s back a moment as he rises, shifting off the bed. Dean is about to lean into it, but Cas has moved away, over to the fireplace, ready to warm up the room. All on Dean’s account.

Dean fries eggs, topped with chives he and Cas found at the edges of the woods a few days previous, and toasts bread over the renewed fire. He heats water in the heavy kettle Cas has in the croft, and Cas insists that on such a day as this, where the chill aches the bones, nettle— _stinging nettle!—_ tea is what’s called for.

Dean sighs and heaps dried nettles into the water.

“If this leaves my mouth in _any_ kind of pain, I’ll never forgive you. And I’ll never speak to you again.”

Cas chuckles.

“Oh, what a peaceful life that would be.”

Dean rolls his eyes. They sit down to their breakfast.

“You’d be bored before the day was out.”

“Take a vow of silence, and we’ll see.”

“And what if I did?” Dean asks with a grin.

“Don’t tease me,” Cas sighs wistfully, “I can only dream.”

Dean, trying not to smirk, trying to bite down on laughter or any kind of amused expression, clamps his jaw shut and stares at Cas, purposefully.

“Oh, so you’re trying it out?” Cas asks, and Dean blinks once. “I can already feel my headache easing.”

Dean continues staring, tries not to let his smile twitch any further. Cas acts as though this is the most ordinary thing in the world, and sighs, practically, pouring more tea into his cup with a peaceful expression.

“I was thinking that now we’ve finished with Blake, we could move onto Keats,” he says, and takes a sip of tea. “For your reading.”

Dean blinks, and says nothing. Cas’s eyes spark.

“I think you’ll like him. We may look at his letters, as well as his poetry.”

Dean sips his tea, and watches Cas over the rim of his cup.

“Of course, it’ll hardly matter if you don’t enjoy him,” Cas continues, conversationally, “as apparently you won’t be able to voice any of your impending complaints.”

Dean leans forward and rests his chin on his hand, still watching Cas through his lashes. He twitches a smile.

“You’re truly dedicated to this act?” Cas asks, with a sigh. Dean’s mouth twitches again. He gives a look which he hopes says _I told you you’d get bored._ Cas eats his toast, and doesn’t rise. “You cook a decent breakfast,” he says, and Dean gives a small, modest nod. “Of course, being only eggs and toast,” Cas admits, to which Dean rolls his eyes. Cas’s gaze fizzes like lightning. “Thank you, Dean,” he says, and regards Dean so intently and so softly that Dean’s mouth actually falls open.

He swallows.

“You’re welcome,” Dean returns.

“Oh, the peace is over?” Cas asks.

“You weren’t appreciating it well enough,” Dean answers with a smile. Cas chuckles. “So,” he says, “Keats, this evening?”

“Keats this evening,” Cas nods.

“You know,” Dean says, “and Sam might’ve offered you this, already—but if you wanted a book—any book, you’d be welcome to have it, from the library. Count it as yours.”

“I thought it was _Bobby’s_ library, and his to lease out?” Cas raises his eyebrows. Dean laughs.

“Oh, he won’t mind. As far as Bobby’s concerned, you can’t be faulted. You shouldn’t have shown him how to make better splints for his poor injured birds. Now he thinks you’re a saint.” Cas hums at Dean’s words, looking down. “Are you shying away from these compliments?” Dean asks, incredulous. “Castiel,” he chuckles, “this _is_ unexpected.”

“Almost as unexpected as your compliments,” Cas returns, warmly.

“I’ll endeavour to give you more.”

Cas rolls his eyes, leaning back.

Dean pours them both more tea. The shepherd gives him a faintly surprised, grateful look at the gesture.

“So—you’ll be proud of me, for this,” Dean says, “I think I saw some velvet shank in the woods, earlier this week. It ought to be big enough to eat, by now.”

“And there’s our dinner, sorted,” Cas replies, gracious and affectionate. Dean smiles.

“Perhaps I’ll be given the opportunity to cook you something a little more impressive than eggs and toast.”

“I was very impressed,” Cas smiles, and gestures to his almost-empty plate, taking a bite of the last of his toast.

“I don’t know where you think your flattery will get you.”

Cas rises. His lips are turned upwards as he takes Dean’s empty plate.

“Is there a plan for today?” Dean asks, following suit. “How many sarcastic comments have you got planned?”

“I’m not sure on that, but I _did_ think I ought to take you down beneath the cliffs, and let the tide wash you away.”

“Uh-huh?” Dean rolls his eyes. “You wouldn’t miss me at all?”

“I can’t imagine it.”

Dean bumps his shoulder against Cas’s as he draws up by the shepherd’s side.

“You’re lucky I think you so funny.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

Dean’s shoulder is still pressed against Cas’s.

He finds that it is, for much of the rest of the day. Inexplicably. Perhaps it’s the cold: the snow has yet to melt, and the air is static with an ice-chill unusual for their setting by the sea. It’s only natural, then, that Dean should press against the shepherd, whose words _and_ frame thrum with a glowing warmth. By the end of the day, the cold has set into Dean’s bones, and Cas does well commenting only once that they’d be a lot more stiff than they are now were it not for the nettle tea, this morning.

Back in the croft, warming his hands round a cup of milk heated and sweetened with honey and mugwort, Dean watches Cas. The shepherd places a copy of Keats, brown-gold and well loved, in front of him.

“While our dinner cooks,” he says, “I thought we might start on Keats.”

“Here’s hoping he’s easier than Shakespeare.”

“Oh, almost certainly,” Cas says, and pulls his chair beside Dean’s. “Although a sight harder than Blake.”

Dean groans.

“You _said_ you wanted to learn how to read,” Cas points out, though his countenance is gentle and affectionate as he speaks these words.

“Yes, but I didn’t realise learning meant _effort.”_

Cas shakes his head, with a small smile, and pushes Dean’s notepad toward him.

“Come on,” he says. Dean sighs. “You might find you like him.”

Dean looks up.

“Well, I did kind of enjoy _Twelfth Night.”_

“Oh, ‘kind of’?” Cas raises his eyebrows. “Praise indeed.”

“And Blake was—I liked reading him. He was weird.—Different,” Dean amends quickly. Cas’s lips are pressed together, as though he’s suppressing a smile. “Stop it,” Dean laughs. “One day, I’ll be a renowned literary critic and essayist—”

“And it’ll all be thanks to me.”

“Shall we just start?” Dean asks, and Cas concedes, opening the book not at the beginning, but to a page toward the middle he has marked out. “Not from page one?” Dean asks. Cas shakes his head.

“There’s no call, with Keats, to read so rigidly.”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“This is my favourite of his poems,” Cas provides.

“I’ll work particularly hard on hating it, then.”

He’s shouldered softly. He laughs, before looking down at the page. He sounds out the first line, as best he can.

_What is more gentle than a wind in summer?_

He looks up. Smiles. Cas’s gaze flicks up from the page, to his face.

“Wind in summer?” He repeats. “It seems a long way away, with snow laying thick outside.

“All the more reason to treasure thoughts of it,” Cas provides.

The croft has a funny habit of rendering everything warmer and closer. Perhaps it’s the tight stone walls, or the fact of them being bathed in amber dancing light each evening.

“I don’t think the snow is so bad.”

“Now _there’s_ a changed tune.”

“You prompted it,” Dean grins. “You should be a music teacher, on top of everything else.”

Cas rolls his eyes, presses his palm to the back of Dean’s head, and softly pushes his gaze back down to the page.

“Continue, Mr Winchester. You read poetry so well.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

“I wasn’t.”

Dean looks up.

“You mean it?”

“I do,” Cas confirms. His hand, still at the back of Dean’s head, tilts his gaze back down again. Dean laughs at the gentle manhandling. Cas’s hand slips from Dean’s hair and comes to rest on the back of Dean’s chair as he reads the next lines.

_What is more soothing than the pretty hummer  
That stays one moment in an open flower,  
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?_

This takes some time to get through. Not nearly as much as it would have, even a week ago—but still Dean stumbles over _soothing_ and _bower._ Cas is steady, patient, all the while. Increasingly, he is reticent to help Dean through his stumbling, will rather let Dean unfold the word causing trouble himself as concentration and occasionally frustration knits his brows together. Cas is never frustrated, though.

“There’s some use in rhyme,” Cas says, after Dean manages to unravel the word ‘bower’, “in helping us learn to read.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’ll give some hint as to what the last word on a line _ought_ to sound like.”

“Right,” Dean rolls his eyes. “And here—he’s talking about bees? ‘Buzzing cheerily’.”

“Just so,” Cas smiles.

 _“The pretty hummer,”_ Dean repeats, with a smile. “That’s—that’s sweet.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Very sweet,” Dean says.

“There’s some great poetry, in bees,” Cas says, and Dean blinks, bemused. “Yes,” Castiel confirms, at the look Dean gives him. “Busy, always working, and somehow always joyful. Moving ever constant and yet, the very sight of home.”

Dean laughs. He tips his head forward to bump it on Cas’s shoulder. Cas’s hand cards his hair.

“Go on,” he says. “Continue.”

Dean lifts his forehand from the cradle of Cas’s shoulder. He looks back down to the page, breathes in, continues.

_What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing  
In a green island, far from all men's knowing?_

He stammers several times over _tranquil._ It’s an unfair and deceiving word, he thinks. Cas’s hand, from where it had returned, to the back of Dean’s chair, comes to rest softly on Dean’s own back as he stammers, all things grounding and assuring. Dean gets _tranquil_ out, and the rest of the words seem to blossom in his mouth. He glances up to Cas and tries not to glow with _too_ much pride, but Cas is glowing with it, too—and now, not only do the words blossom, but his heart does, too. He looks back down, smiling, and continues.

_More healthful than the leafiness of dales?  
More secret than a nest of nightingales?_

He looks up.

“We ought to show this poem to Bobby,” he states, and Cas chuckles.

“Are we _ever_ to make it through this poem, Dean, or will you be providing a running commentary for every other line?”

“I’m just refining my skills, for when I become a famous essayist.”

“I look forward to reading your reviews in the papers.”

“They’ll be biting,” Dean grins.

“Not if they spend the whole time speaking of Mr Singer’s birds,” Cas states. “Which is a little esoteric, alongside everything else.”

“Esoteric,” Dean smirks.

“It means—”

“I know what it means,” Dean squints sarcastically.

“Well, aren’t you the picture of an educated gentleman.”

Dean sputters a laugh. He huffs.

“I’m just saying,” he states, “the poem talks about birds. Bobby likes birds.”

“Mr Singer likes birds?” Cas raises his eyebrows. Dean laughs again. His head returns to Cas’s shoulder. Cas doesn’t reject it. If anything—leans into it.

“Nightingales, especially,” Dean says.

“Yes—what was the name of his favourite?” Cas asks.

“Elowen,” Dean smiles. “Means elm tree. In Cornish.” A pause. He smiles, taking his head off Cas’s shoulder. “Is Cornish anything like Irish?”

“No,” Castiel answers. “I’m afraid not. Maybe distant relatives, but distant is the operative word.”

“Like second cousins?”

“Perhaps,” Cas laughs. “Now, to Keats.”

Dean licks his lips and continues.

The poem is long. They still aren’t finished by the time their dinner has cooked. That’s okay—there’s little rush, and Cas’s hand comes to rest assuringly at Dean’s back each instance the words cause him trouble.

Dinner is two fish—hake—wrapped in seaweed and smoked, and the velvet shank Dean found. A few potatoes are boiled and salted on the side. Cas lights a few more candles as the darkness creeps in, and they sit to eat.

“Perhaps one of these days I’ll bring a bottle of wine for us to drink, as we eat,” Dean suggest, and Cas glances up from his meal, eyes sparking.

“I’ve don’t nothing to stop you from doing so, so far,” he points out. Dean snorts.

“Well, then. I will.”

“Treating me.”

“Thanking you,” Dean corrects, “for all of it.”

“All of it?” Cas raises his eyebrows to Dean.

“Everything,” Dean smiles. “Everything you do, have done, for me. Wine doesn’t begin to cover it,” he laughs, “but it’ll make a start. And a merry one.”

“You’re suggesting drunkenness?” Cas asks. “In _my_ croft?”

“Well, it being so cold, I wouldn’t suggest drunkenness outside,” Dean quips.

“And considering your propensity to slip on muddy soil, sober, I wouldn’t suggest it either.”

Dean huffs out a laugh.

“Ass.”

“And what do you think of Keats?” Cas asks, instead of rising.

“You seem to like him.”

“I know what _I_ think of him.”

Dean licks his lips, suppressing a smile. He enjoys stringing out the tension of the moment.

“Yes, I like him,” he confirms, finally. “You like him a _lot,”_ he observes. Cas blinks warmly.

“I’ll confess, I hold him dear to me.”

“Why’s that?”

Cas shrugs, takes a bite of his dinner. Dean doesn’t speak, only watches the shepherd. He has learnt that one way to coax him from his silence is to sit, yourself, in a kind of expectant silence.

“When you travel as far, as often as me, you must have companions in your own mind,” Cas says, mysteriously, after a moment.

“And Keats was one of yours?”

“Of a kind.”

“I hope you aren’t planning on travelling again, any time soon.”

Cas raises his eyebrows, intrigued at this statement. Dean’s cheeks prickle in response to his own words.

“Well,” he says, cheeks rosy in the firelight. “I suppose this place is comfortable enough.”

“Only the place?” Dean asks.

“The people are okay, too, I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“Although there’s this one man, Dean Winchester, who asks _incessant_ questions.”

“Perhaps it’s because you’re so secretive and mysterious,” Dean laughs, “and therefore interesting.”

“In that case, I must be sure not to answer too many of your questions,” Cas points out, “or I’ll cease to be so interesting to you.”

“You’ll always be interesting to me,” Dean smiles, and means it. Cas hums. He eats, and watches Dean. Dean watches back. Finally, Cas speaks again.

“I have told you, my mother would have us recite poetry over our evening meal. Keats was one of those poets.”

“And this is a fond memory,” Dean says.

“Very.”

“I’m glad.”

“Keats was always a piece of home. Even when I left it.”

“Why did you leave it?” Dean asks. But Cas’s eyes turn down.

“When?” He asks.

“When?” Dean repeats, with a frown. “You left it more than once?”

“Enough trading secrets,” Cas’s face knits together, and a wall seems to build around it. “Enough questions.”

Dean is set awry.

“You don’t trust me?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“Dean.”

Dean’s lips turn down.

Stung silence.

“You’d think less of me,” Cas supplies, at last, and Dean shakes his head.

“I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t ever.”

“Your opinion is already too low to go lower?” Cas jokes, but Dean doesn’t laugh.

“You know what I meant.”

Cas flicks his gaze away. Dean presses his own, hard, at the shepherd.

“You’d think less of me,” Cas says again, and with such a certain firmness that Dean knows he means it.

“Then maybe I ought to share some stories to make you think less of me,” Dean laughs, and Cas cracks a smile, and sighs.

“I could never think poorly of you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Try me,” Cas says, earnest. Dean leans back with a laugh.

“I wish to know you better.”

Dean grows frustrated. They’re holding two conversations, at once.

“No one has known me better, in some years, now,” Cas says, softly. Dean’s heart twinges.

“Okay, but once, someone knew you better than I know you, now.”

“Inevitably, yes.”

“I don’t like that,” Dean laughs, flush. “Who? I want to know you best.”

“My family,” Cas rolls his eyes, “is that such a crime?

“Only your family?” Dean asks.

“You’re jealous?”

“No,” Dean glowers, and leans back again, withdrawing. “I just think it’s strange, that you’d spend all your time with me, and not trust me with—”

“I trust you a great deal,” Cas counters, “and what, you trust _me_ with everything?”

Dean glares. The shepherd sighs. He shakes his head, sadly.

“Secrets ought to be shared with trust and entrust, not guilt and resentment.”

Dean looks down, shamed by Cas’s words.

“I want to know you.”

“You _do,”_ Cas points out.

“All of you.”

“All of me?”

Dean looks up.

“Every inch,” he answers. “Every breath. Every second.”

Cas’s gaze scintillates.

“You may not like what you learn,” he says.

“Love is with the heart, not the mind,” Dean answers, without thinking. He blinks at his own words, confused. Cas blinks, too. Obviously neither of them had expected this. And what the hell does Dean mean by love?

“I left home,” Cas confesses, after a moment’s mutual staring, stunned, “twice. Once when I was a tempestuous, impulsive teenager. I returned, eventually. And then, once I had nothing left.”

“All gone,” Dean says, and remembers the words Cas said of his family, in those first glared and bitten days of their early acquaintance.

“All gone,” Cas repeats, sadly.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says.

“You know what it is to be alone,” Cas shrugs, but looks away.

“Not all alone,” Dean contends. “Resentful and bitter I may have been, but never alone. Not like you—not like you were forced to be.”

Cas looks back to him, presses his lips together.

“It is a terrible thing, an uprooting.”

“Right,” Dean falters.

“And to uproot yourself…”

“Yes,” Dean agrees, “is hard.”

“Is more than hard.”

“Like tearing open a wound.”

Cas’s brows slope with the relief of one suddenly understood.

“Just so.”

“And you’ve never lain your roots down, since,” Dean states, and watches the shepherd. Cas flickers.

“It’s not so easy…”

“Have I been making it hard?”

“That’s loaded,” Cas frowns. Dean shakes his head.

“I want to know.”

“And why?” Cas asks. “Why would you want to know?”

Dean’s brow curls with worry.

“I want to know,” he repeats.

“You expect secrets from me,” Cas points out.

“I want to be a reason,” Dean says, and says it hard and resentful with sincerity and the weight of these words’ vulnerability, “I want to be the reason for you to want to stay.”

Cas is somehow surprised by these words. How could he not have expected them?

“Oh,” he says. He looks down. His cheeks, again, are pink in the candlelight. Dean has not seen him so awry, not from their very first meeting.

“You’re surprised?”

Cas doesn’t answer this. He blinks, looking at Dean. Their words are loaded guns and the ether around them stings with the smoke of explosives. Each sentence, each question, each answer, is a cartridge, is coated with gunpowder, is a struck match. What will be left of the croft when they have finished?

Cas’s words are shrapnel, when they come.

“I am not used to people wanting me to stay.”

Dean’s lips turn down.

“And I’m not used to people wanting to stay,” he replies.

Cas’s gaze softens.

“I cannot imagine that.”

“I cannot imagine anyone not needing you—nor knowing you, and not loving you.”

Stung silence. Were Dean’s words a white flag, or a mine?

“Ah, then,” Cas says, “you will have trouble imagining any chapter of my past.”

Dean’s heart cracks like baked clay.

“Then you’ll have to tell me about it.”

“I am not some wild beast, for you to coax out of its hole,” Cas frowns defensively, bristled by Dean’s tone and sad expression.

“Then prove it.”

The shepherd sighs.

“I left home once,” he says, after silence which stretches like the plains of Dean’s old home, for miles and miles. For some reason, it makes Dean appreciate the texture and cadence of Cornish land. “When I was a much younger man. Barely yet a man, but arrogant enough to believe I was one. My mother had died of the fever. Grief is a stammer in the brain. It makes us stumble, in the years of loss. I stumbled out the door, and left.”

“Oh,” Dean says. “And—and then you returned?”

“Not for some time,” Cas says. He takes a long drink of his tea, which sits beside his meal.

“But eventually.”

“Eventually,” Cas answers. “But by that time…”

“By that time?” Dean raises his eyebrows, and then berates himself for pressing—he ought to have waited, waited for Cas to unknot the brambles of his thoughts and tread them out, aloud—not have poked and prodded like the shepherd was, in his own words, some wild beast to be coaxed from its den.

He’s proven right. Cas’s jaw clamps, resentfully. Another silence like a vice closes around them.

“I wish I had something wise and kind, or even just comforting, to say to you,” Dean confesses. “You make it so easy for me to trust you. I can’t do the same for you. I’m sorry.”

“Who said you couldn’t?” Cas asks, with a frown.

Dean’s eyes sting as he looks at the shepherd.

“You,” Dean answers. “Though you didn’t _say_ it,” he admits. Cas swallows. Silence. Again. They stare. Cas’s eyes glitter in the candlelight.

“I have been deaf to the song of my own heart,” he says, at last. Dean falters. His jaw is fixed shut. He can’t reply. “And fearful, that seeing my heart, you would reject it.”

Dean’s chest unbinds. So does his mouth.

“I never could.”

Cas’s eyes crest like a wave.

“I returned home,” he says at last, “when word reached me—eventually—that each of my younger siblings had contracted smallpox. I returned too late, and could care for them only in their last. I watched them die.” Dean’s chest becomes a vacuum to sorrow as Cas speaks. The shepherd’s eyes are awash with trouble, a murky sea after a storm. “All but one, a half sister, who was not yet born, but close enough to it. My father remarried in my absence. Her mother died in labor, I helped deliver, but was not help enough—used only to sheep, and not the complications _people_ present to the ordeal,” he says, guilty. “I couldn’t—the irony,” he looks at Dean, “is that _my_ mother was a midwife. If only she’d been there to help,” he jokes. Dean can’t laugh. “But my sister survived,” he continues. “She was a wonder,” Cas smiles warm, sad, lost to the mists of time and re-memory. His eyes swim with them. “All things soft and bright in the word, a world of so much hardness, so much darkness. No—my youngest sister, she was a marvel.”

Dean thinks of Cas’s resentment to Dean, whenever he mistreated or alienated Adam, or called him half or bastard brother. Is this where it stems from? Or just the goodness of the shepherd’s heart? Knowing Cas, it could be either.

“The brightest smile that you could think of. If she—if she’d had a chance, she would’ve caused such mischief,” he laughs, but God, it is a poisoned laugh. “Oh, she would have been trouble. But—” he seems to swim back through the waters of time and memorial, “—gone, now.” His gaze turns harrowed, his wistful smile falls.

“I’m so sorry—”

“Oh, and it was your fault?”

“You know what I mean.”

Cas sighs, frame softening with regret at his bitten words.

“I do,” he admits.

“Then what happened?” Dean asks. Cas’s gaze churns like the sea.

“When tragedy strikes, it rarely strikes but once. The opposite of lightning. It returned to the wound, and struck, and struck, and struck.”

Dean swallows.

“My father and my older brother carried the rage of all that had happened—Dean, I don’t know what you know of politics—” Cas presses his lips together, “England gutted my country. That is Irish history, over and over. And my father felt it acutely. Whatever my father felt, my brother felt, also. Both were killed, in a Fenian rising.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“Not the first, nor the last, blood to be spilled in the name of the British Empire.”

The darkness presses them from all sides, seems to push them closer together.

“But all that rage…” Cas sighs, pushing his plate away. Dean can see, or maybe only imagine, his mind. Flashes of colour unseen by the sun. Or maybe Cas’s mind _is_ the sun. “All that rage,” he repeats, shaking his head. “I could never swallow it. It felt like poison. I wanted… I don’t know what I wanted. I cared for my youngest sister. It was just us, then. Just us, and the land, and my father’s and forefather’s flock. That was enough. My sister needed me. I needed… to be needed. To be wanted. But,” his eyes tremble like starlight, “it was not to last.”

Dean watches, silent, frowning, hurting.

“She passed, too, in the end. I could not save her. Whooping cough. I couldn’t save her.”

Dean can’t swallow.

He feels so small—so small in the face of Cas’s sorrow, and so small in the face of his—his selfishness, his obstinance, his idiocy. None of what Novak suffered was deserved, and yet he suffers the guilt for it, as well as the sorrow.

“Cas—”

“You needn’t say anything,” Castiel says. “This is why I don’t like to speak of it. It is a burden, and shouldering it to others is hardly…” But he trails off.

“I would shoulder it with you,” Dean says, earnestly, “if you’d let me. Whatever you’d let me, I would carry.”

Cas swallows. It seems difficult.

“After that, I—or I felt that I—had nothing left. Nothing to stay for. I left the farm, the flock, the land of my forebears… I took to wandering, again—only this time, I had no one to call me home. That’s a listlessness you cannot speak of. It’s one thing to roam. It’s another to roam without a tether.”

“You say all this as though you—as though you feel a guilt, because of it.”

“And shouldn’t I?” Cas raises his eyebrows, gives Dean a harder, meaner look than he has, yet. Ever. “The farm. The flock. The place of my family. I left it—all of it—because I could not swallow my own sorrow.”

“You—you were robbed of so much, you’d suffered so much,” Dean stammers out. “It wasn’t your fault, Cas, that you were left—left—”

“It _was_ my fault, that I left.”

“Cas—” Dean’s heart is sore.

 _“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,”_ Cas recites, interrupting, and Dean frowns. _“But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.”_

“Cas, there’s hardly a comparison—”

 _“Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock!”_ Cas continues, features darkened. Shadows slant under his brow and his head tips forward with heavy anger. _“The sword shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye: his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened.”_

Dean’s chest is filled with ash.

“Please, Cas—"

 _“And now be thou cursed from the ground, which hath opened its mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand,”_ Cas’s speech crests like a wave, makes Dean shiver. _“When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield thee its strength; a wanderer and fugitive shalt thou be on the earth.”_

Dean’s mouth turns down, he cannot swallow.

“Cas,” he says, and realises that he’s crying with Cas’s words, and Cas looks up, startled at Dean’s tears. And then he cries, too.

“What kind of shepherd abandons his flock?” Castiel asks, voice only fragments of regret and desperate shame. It splinters in the air. “Would kind of man, am I?”

Dean gets up. He’s up, and round the table, in a heartbeat. Cas is on his feet and the moment is wild with ecstasy but all that happens is Dean pulling Cas toward him to hug tightly. He can’t give his embrace the same weight and sincerity Cas’s always seems to carry.

His hand goes to the back of Cas’s head, he cradles it, turns it in toward his neck, where Cas’s tears smear hot on his skin. Dean’s chest tremors beneath Castiel’s; Castiel’s all but disintegrates. The room crumbles around them; warm waters stream at Dean’s face and Cas’s breath is rough as gravel against the curve of Dean’s shoulder. There is only this, and them, this raw and desperate moment and an entire landscape of regret which Dean cannot redeem, although he can give new soil for Cas to lay his roots down, wants nothing more than to provide this, to provide the shepherd with a reason to never leave, never leave again.

And so they stand, and so they stay, for great inhaling, exhaling minutes. Minutes ravaged by the thrum of sorrow in Dean’s ears.

“What kind of man are you?” Dean asks, at last, repeating Cas’s question to him. He breathes his words out into the air in front of him. Cas is still bound up in his arms; he is still bound up in Cas’s. “What kind of man are you?” Dean repeats, and laughs it, breathless, this time. “The very best. The best of them all.”

“Dean,” Cas laughs, tearily, obviously unconvinced, but Dean shakes his head.

“The best of them all,” he repeats.

…

Spring emerges from behind closed leaves. The farm takes on more hands, and Dean, for the planting and barn repairing after the winter, is called from the focus he had sustained for months, on shepherding. He misses the days watching the size of Cas’s steps, the fascinating and focussed movements of his hands, he misses watching the sun glint of Cas’s bright and ice-fiery eyes, he misses the smell of water on grass as Cas’s voice, a voice like music, sounded in his ears.

Still, he continues teaching Dean, however. Every night they sit in the croft together, and tread through Keats, and, as March begins, Dean brings Castiel a pile of books—writers he’s mentioned passingly with undeniable affection—for them to start on, and tells Cas these books are his, now, his to keep.

“I think Mr Singer might have words to say about that,” Cas responds, doubtful. Dean grins.

“And they’d all be positive.”

Cas gives Dean a cynical look. Dean only grins, and presses the books into Cas’s hands.

To welcome the new workers, they clear out one of the barns and carry in a barrel of cider and glasses. Mick, Cas, and a lady new to the Eyrie, Jody, play music for them all—Cas playing a violin found in the attic of the farmhouse—and easy as the tide, they all begin to dance. It’s been a while since Dean has had a call to do so, and he can’t complain: Jo takes his hands and spins him fast, and violently, and as his head is giddy with some elderberry wine he and Cas shared—brewed specially by the shepherd, just before the dancing—his head gets only giddier.

He laughs and curses at her, and tries to slow them, which barely works, and so swings into it, while Jo laughs and kicks at him. Bobby takes out his harmonica and sits beside the musicians and almost certainly brings down the general quality of their playing but it hardly matters, he seems so pleased to be involved, and all the new hands are either too drunken or too kind or too generally happy to much care. The barn is bathed in the orange light of lanterns hung about, high above heads to save them from the risk of toppling and starting some kind of fire.

Cas’s eyes are blazing and flashing every time Dean, grinning, glances over to him. Cas is always looking back.

Dean’s heart thunders from the pace of the dancing. Eventually, attempting to catch his breath, he approaches Cas with a glass of cider for each of them.

“I can’t drink that,” Cas laughs.

“What? Why not?” Dean asks.

“Playing requires both of my hands,” Cas answers, and as if to underline this point, begins a new song, into which Jody, Mick, and far less proficiently, Bobby, all join.

“Then I’ll just feed it to you, while you play,” Dean grins.

“You will not,” Cas says, dangerously, but already, Dean, grinning, has looped his arm over Cas’s shoulder and tips the cup toward his mouth. “Dean—” Cas sputters, but swallows, as Dean laughs so hard his head tips forward to rest on Cas’s shoulder. “Ass,” Cas growls, when Dean removes himself, still laughing. “And you spiked that, didn’t you.”

“It’s sweet cider,” Dean counters, “it needed something to—”

“What, clean the varnish off a table?”

“No,” Dean laughs, “I only added a _little_ rum. And you’re so uptight, I thought it might relax you.”

Cas rolls his eyes. Dean grins. The shepherd is suppressing a smile. Dean stays by his side until the song ends, when Cas takes the glass from Dean’s hand, tips it against Dean’s, and takes a long drink from it.

“Rum and cider,” he shakes his head, wrinkling his nose. “Whoever told you _that_ was a sensible combination, Winchester…”

“Oh, I never said it was _tasty,”_ Dean grins.

“Tasty? I can barely swallow it.”

Laughter bubbles from Dean.

When Cas has finished his drink and must return to playing, Dean ruffles at his hair and leaves, inviting Ellen to dance with him, who beams and warns him not to spin her anywhere near as violently as he and Jo had, each other.

After another thirty minutes, Dean glances back over at Cas, still playing. A little out of breath again, he approaches the shepherd once more.

“You ought to let somebody else have a go at that,” he states. Castiel frowns.

“You dislike my playing, Winchester?”

“Not at all,” Dean laughs. “But if you play all night, then how am I to dance with you?”

Cas’s eyes turn soft and bemused.

“Get back to your turning about, Dean,” he laughs. “I’m a man at work.”

But not ten minutes later, Cas is at his side, and taking a hold of his hand. Dean falters, shocked, and Cas squints.

“You did _ask_ me,” he points out, and Dean laughs, breathless.

“I did,” he admits. “I only—I thought you turned me down.”

“I’d do no such thing,” Cas shakes his head, and turns them about. “Not ever.”

It’s like the sun is rising, in Dean’s chest. Cas steadies Dean every time he threatens, grinning, to spin them out of control. Dean laughs and tugs hard, trying to do so repeatedly. But Cas is strong, and steady, and not so easily blown about, not so easily blown about as Dean’s head and heart, both of which are reeling.

Many of the workers have turned in; the time is late. This is the last song he’ll play, Mick announces. What remains of the throng all groan sadly, but Mick suggests singing, instead of dancing—and for better or worse, several are eager to try their hands at it. Dean takes Cas’s wrist, and they sit on the floor, leaning back against one of the walls of the barn. Cas’s fingers rest beside Dean’s. Adam comes to sit next to them, after a few songs, and Dean frowns.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

Adam shakes his head, rubbing at his eyes.

“I’m not tired,” he says.

“Oh, it sure looks that way.”

“I’m _not,”_ Adam grumbles. “And _Sam’s_ still awake.”

“Yeah, brother or not, Sam’s still an adult. You’re young. C’mon.”

“Dean,” Adam looks up at him with pleading eyes, but they’re hilariously bloodshot.

“You’re exhausted,” Dean laughs, reaching out to ruffle Adam’s hair, but Adam bats him off. “You can stay for one more song,” he offers with a sigh. “But then it’s bed, okay?”

“Okay,” Adam sighs. He turns to Cas, who watches them warmly. “Will you sing the next one, Cas?” He asks. Cas blinks.

“Oh—I wouldn’t wish to subject—”

Dean laughs.

“You sang for us, on Christmas Eve,” he points out. “I _know_ you have a voice, and a good one, at that.” Cas gives Dean a look, but Dean only smiles back. “Go on,” he says, “otherwise Adam will _never_ go to bed. Sing for us.” Cas seems reluctant. “Sing for me,” Dean says, tilting his head forward with the request. Cas blinks. He doesn’t answer for a moment. Then the tension in his shoulders eases.

“If that’s what you wish,” he says, and Dean beams.

“It is,” he confirms. And Cas is up, off the floor, the warm presence at his side is gone, and Dean watches with wonder as Cas approaches Jody, and whispers something in her ear. She smiles and nods in confirmation, and picks up Cas’s abandoned fiddle.

Cas stands in front of the small group.

“I have a song for you,” he states, “and have been asked by my employer to sing it. You may blame him, for whatever comes next.”

Benny glances back and rolls his eyes at Dean. Victor, sat beside Lafitte, flashes him a smile.

Dean pretends to look unimpressed, but cannot sustain it. Not while looking at Cas. Not while looking at the very definition of wonder.

“And here it is,” Cas says, “a song, a love song, for one who has nothing, and is loved, anyway.” Cas’s gaze flits toward Dean. His eyes are the Atlantic. Severe and weighted and stormy with the mysteries of only the most ancient and buried things. “May all of us be the lucky objects of such regard.”

He starts.

Dean’s heart is shedding skin, is opening like the buds of May, is unfolding like the sunbound motions of a sapling. He watches Castiel and remembers his nightmare and the dredges of unacknowledged memories and the weight of rot sitting heavy at the base of a person’s soul and nearly gasps with it, Sam glances back at Dean and frowns, troubled, at the expression on his face. Dean forces himself to swallow but barely can: his soul is a bird covered in tar, and it cannot fly away.

_I've no sheep on the mountains  
nor boat on the lake  
Nor coin in my coffer  
to keep me awake  
Nor corn in my garner,  
nor fruit on my tree  
Yet the maid of Llanwellyn  
smiles sweetly on me._

Cas sings, and Dean’s heart sings back, and Dean hears it.

What was it, Cas said, that night in the croft?

_“I have been deaf to the song of my own heart.”_

Well, Dean had, too.

Cas made, has always made, simply _being,_ too easy. Dean never needed to interrogate it. Never needed to listen to the music turning in his chest.

And now he hears it. Now he hears all of it. It cries out, rejoices, laments, both joy and fear which is, Dean guesses, the tragedy of it all, the tragedy of all of this, the tragedy of being a man and torn by the glass shards of feeling, feeling like this, feeling like this, _now,_ for—

Cas sings.

Dean’s soul sings back.

His eyes sting like the white-hot blades of Cas’s forge press at their surface.

_No sheep on the mountain nor goats,  
No horses to offer, nor boats,  
Only hens I have by me,  
they are one, two and three,  
Yet the Maid of Llanwellyn smiles sweetly on me._

No, no, Dean nearly cries. This is a death sentence. Surely. This is death.

Jody, at the fiddle, reels out long and trembling notes like mist on water to accompany the steady-as-stone devotion of Cas’s voice.

Surely, this longing is death. _Lust_ for another nearly caused death for Dean. What will this do to him?

_Rich Owen will tell you,  
with eyes full of scorn  
Threadbare is my coat,  
and my hosen are torn  
Scoff on, my rich Owen,  
for faint is thy glee  
When the maid of Llanwellyn  
smiles sweetly on me._

But Cas is looking at Dean as he sings.

What could he mean, what could he have meant, in every one of their interactions, with every one of his words, his gestures, his deeds, his looks—if he did not mean the same?

And what does he mean, now?

_No sheep on the mountain nor goats,  
No horses to offer, nor boats,  
Only hens I have by me,  
they are one, two and three,  
Yet the Maid of Llanwellyn smiles sweetly on me._

The patience, the lessons, the meals, the coat.

He’s looking at Dean.

_The farmer rides proudly  
to market and fair  
And the clerk at the ale house  
still claims the great chair  
But of all our proud fellows  
the proudest I'll be  
While the maid of Llanwellyn  
smiles sweetly on me._

He’s looking at Dean. Dean can barely move. Can barely breathe. He’s looking at _Dean._

Dean reels in a breath, heavy at his chest. It’s like dragging a great weight from beneath choppy waves.

_No sheep on the mountain nor goats,  
No horses to offer, nor boats,  
Only hens I have by me,  
they are one, two and three,  
Yet the Maid of Llanwellyn smiles sweetly on me._

His eyes are searing. Just, he manages to twitch his lips upward, as Cas repeats the final line. The shepherd seems to glow. His eyes shimmer.

The small crowd applauds—the few women in the throng eye Cas with intentional, shining gazes, and who could blame them?—but Cas’s gaze is on Dean. Purposeful and sincere. Dean swallows, and looks back, and—and loves. He loves a love Cas is to good for and yet, somehow, has said he is thankful for. And Cas loves Dean with a love steady and sure as the soil—surely, these are the voiceless words which ring in Cas’s gaze. A declaration, requited. Dean can barely breath, though he tries. He can barely look back, though he forces himself to. And he does his best to smile sweetly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> collared doves are monogamous and are symbols of love and friendship !!! both of which seem pretty applicable to the story of dean and cas - and to this chapter in particular.
> 
> [here's the song cas sang!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo05meaz97I)
> 
> follow me on twitter [here](https://twitter.com/thesilentIand)
> 
> i hope u enjoyed! lots of love <3


	13. Songthrush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello sorry this took a while !!! i hope you like it. Robin i promised several chapters to dedicate a chapter to you but kept on forgetting to say so at the beginning of chapter notes - so this chapter is dedicated to you! (realistically it should've been the chapter which was also called Robin - the christmas chapter! - because that's a clear choice BUT you can lay claim to this one and that one, too!) I hope you like it and I hope things are going okay for you :)

The night ends. Dean, tentative as grass in a flickering wind, looks at Castiel. Castiel looks back. The dry yellow light of the barn curls around them in currents on the air. Two women are beside the shepherd, smiling winningly and complimenting him, but Dean can’t even feel jealous. They’re pretty and young and sweet, undeniably sweet on _Castiel,_ and Dean can’t even feel _jealous._ Cas looks at _him._ And now that Dean knows Castiel to be so steadfast, how could he feel any curl of jealousy, any bite of resentment? He can’t. Love is not possession. Cas told him this, once. Not in having, not in owning. Love is being met with. Two travellers meeting on mist-smeared hills. And Cas’s gaze meets with his, one half of those two travellers. It does, doesn’t it? It does?

The barn is steadily emptied of its people like blood lobbing out of skin. Dean waits for Castiel at the door. Sam is busy putting out all the lanterns, and though Castiel offers him a hand with this, Sam declines, and thanks Cas for his singing and playing, a sentiment Dean would echo if he could even _speak_.

By now. everyone else has left.

Approaching the door, Castiel stops in front of Dean.

“Are you waiting for something?” He asks. Dean’s answer is breathless.

“You,” he replies. The shepherd blinks.

“Oh.”

“I thought—” Dean can barely find his words. The urge to lash out in defensiveness rises within him, but he suppresses it. “Care to walk?” He asks, instead of biting something out, as he would have only a matter of months ago. But being met with such softness and patience as lives in the shepherd… Well, it’s changed him—or perhaps returned him to what he was, and wanted to be, and was too scared to attempt to return to, for fear of failure or rejection or both. There’s a comfort in hardness, in living like a bird among the craggy rocks of cliffs: it’s a defense, no predator would dare to approach for fear of the waves beating them against the sharp shards of slate all around. But no friend would dare approach, either. Except Cas. Cas approached and coaxed Dean out from among the blades of stone and out toward the sands which are soft and golden underfoot.

Castiel blinks once, and follows Dean out the door.

“Your brother—”

“Sammy’s fine,” Dean shakes his head. “He doesn’t need my help.”

“If you’re sure,” Castiel says, unconvinced. He seems vaguely nervous, but with a stillness to his worry Dean would never expect to see in anyone else. He’d never expect to see much of what Cas is, in anyone else. “I’d hate to be the cause of some sibling feud.”

“You won’t be,” Dean promises. And, to prove this, calls back into the barn, “thanks, Sammy!”

Sam lets out a huff within. He picks up abandoned cups in the muted light provided by the last of the lanterns. Dean turns to smile at the shepherd. Cas only rolls his eyes in answer, though it’s good natured.

“Where did you suppose this walk might take us, Mr Winchester?”

Dean laughs, nervous.

“I hadn’t thought that far in advance,” he confesses. His thoughts had been so focussed on the _who—_ Cas—he hadn’t stopped a moment to think of the _where._ But he has something to say. He wants to say it. To say _you sang that song beautifully, so beautifully, it shouldn’t be a surprise: all of you is so beautiful. Is it wrong to say I hope you sang it for me? Would I be wrong to say that you did?_

“And it’s awfully dark, for an amble.”

“You’ve proven yourself more than capable at catching me, at each of my falls in the past,” Dean points out. “I’ll trust you for this, too.”

Out of the barn, the night is cold. The currents of light like air which swam around them inside are gone, seem more distant by the still waters of night all about, the stationary swimming light of the stars, the wet and watery light of the moon.

Cas’s smile is as bright as it is small in the soft darkness.

“What was that line in the Shakespeare,” Dean grins, heart fluttering, watching the shepherd, who doesn’t reply. _“Trip no further, pretty sweeting?”_

Castiel huffs.

“Ay, that was it.” The grass, beneath their feet, as they step out onto it, is wet with dew and shimmers palely at each movement. “You’ve learnt the words admirably, though not the sentiment.”

Dean stammers a laugh and grazes his shoulder against Castiel’s.

 _“Journeys end in lovers meeting,”_ he sings, to the tune Cas taught him. Castiel looks up at him. The column of his throat tightens as he swallows. Dean watches it. Cas’s mouth twitches. Dean watches it.

“Just so.”

Dean’s chest, tighter than a clenched fist, will not allow him to release the breath he’s holding.

“I—um,” he stammers out, “I wanted to tell you how well you sang tonight.”

Castiel’s gaze, even in the darkness, is the paradoxical softness of a summer storm.

“You wanted to tell me?”

“I _am_ telling you,” Dean huffs out, though it’s lighthearted, just nervous. Still nervous. He felt so comfortable around Castiel, just an hour ago. And now, he’s drenched in all the terror of knowledge. Ignorance is a soft and mute kind of embrace. There is nothing like the safety of innocence. “You sang well.”

The few lights on in the windows of the farmhouse, a flickering of candles, begin to go out. Everyone is ready for rest, but Dean’s heart is all nerve-endings, bright and frayed and raw.

“I thank you.”

The hill they walk over begins to turn more steeply upward. Cas leans into the incline.

“That song was—was—” Dean cannot get the words out. The stars, overhead, riddling the sky, tick at them like the immeasurable cogs of some vast clock. “Was a love song?”

Cas’s lips are pressed together. He regards Dean, softly, a moment as they walk.

“It was,” he says. “And is.”

“It’s—it’s a—” And when has speech been so difficult? And what about thought? All of Dean is clay. Cas is the waves. He’s washed away, doesn’t even need the force of the waters to crumble him, just being within them will rinse him, dissolve him, completely. And this is what he does. He rinses away. “It’s an awfully beautiful sentiment,” he manages, at last, to get out. The words aren’t nearly as elegant as he wants them to be, and not even cutting in their simplicity. His voice, for whatever reason, has diminished utterly. A blade of grass in the wind. He’s softened, he bends to whatever wind Castiel might direct. “To—to be loved by someone, in spite of…” But he can’t speak. “In spite of it all.”

“In spite of it all?” Castiel repeats.

The smell of dew, cool on grass, is ribboned on the air.

“You know,” Dean struggles. He tries not to panic. He tries not to lash out. It’s like trying to tame the waves. “That… That sometimes loving someone, is… Is all fear that you aren’t enough. That you haven’t enough to offer. That what you are, or have, is too little.”

“Ah, you oughtn’t be too afraid of that,” Castiel shakes his head.

Dean’s heart lances upward through his chest.

“Oh?” He asks, all hope, eyes turned up brightly on Cas.

“You’re to inherit a farm,” the shepherd points out. And, as quickly as it shot upward, Dean’s heart falls again.

He huffs, anger prickling his insides.

“That’s not what I mean…” He mumbles.

“And what did you mean?” Cas asks, voice softer, this time, and almost apologetic for his joke with its softness.

“That… That I wasn’t always to inherit a farm,” Dean says. “And sometimes… Most of the time, I even forget that I’m to take on the Eyrie. It’s not…” What can he say? That he spends so much of his time with Castiel that the small room of the croft feels more like his home than anywhere has before? That _Cas_ gives him more of a sturdy sense of belonging than anyone has yet afforded him? That he thinks of himself, when he imagines himself, as a shepherd-in-training, as a farmhand and companion to a man who, until very recently, was vagrant, traveller, nomadic as the clouds? _That’s_ who Dean is, in his own mind—when he isn’t _hated_ by his own mind. When Dean thinks of himself kindly, he thinks of him as he is with Castiel. “All I mean is, I’ve thought it, I still think it, too.”

“Think what?” Castiel asks.

“What have I to offer?” Dean says, in answer. “What is it that I have to offer someone who loves me?”

Cas blinks distant and thoughtful for a moment. Dean watches him with a flutter of hopeful nerves inside him like dead leaves tossed by the wind.

“A reasonable sense of humour.”

_“Reasonable?”_

“Unreasonable?” Cas amends. Dean groans, bumps his shoulder with Cas’s again. Castiel laughs softly a moment. “I’ve not finished,” he says. Glancing up longsufferingly at the sky, with its dark blues woven with black and the silver light of stars, Dean inhales slowly. He doesn’t know what he wants. He _does_ know what he wants. That’s half the problem. He’s afraid of it. “An unreasonable sense of humour, and many insane demands—”

_“Cas!”_

“I never said they were bad things.”

“You didn’t need to,” Dean rolls his eyes.

The sound of the waves beyond crests over the hills.

“And I’m still not finished.”

“Well?” Dean raises his eyebrows in the darkness, though he isn’t sure he wants to hear it. “What else?”

“You’re now, I would say, a proficient shepherd—”

“—Oh, _you_ would say—”

“Do you ever want me to finish?”

Their hands are grazing each other. It makes Dean’s heart jolt. God, God, he wants to tangle their fingers.

“Go on,” Dean sighs, after a beat of silence.

Drawing closer to the sea, the smell of salt stings the air alongside the lilt of dew grazed off of grass by their footfalls. They continue their roaming, vaguely, toward the croft. Will Dean have the time, or courage, to say what he needs to by the time they reach it?

“A proficient shepherd, a proficient cook, you can now name and prepare a few dozen wild plants for eating,”

“—As all these things are thanks to you, I think you’re praising yourself right now, more than anything else—”

“You have a love for learning, or at least, a determination to do so, which I cannot but admire,” Cas continues. “You have a work ethic I’ve not seen, I think, in my many years—”

 _“Many_ years,” Dean repeats with a laugh. “You’re a young man, still, Mr Novak—”

“—And a heart, Dean,” Castiel turns to face him, stops walking. “You’ve such a heart. I don’t know how one chest can house it.”

Dean’s skin is suddenly too tight, stretched against his bones.

He’d wanted to hear something like this, had been all but begging for it—but now that it’s said, the words cannot ring true in his ears, can barely make it _past_ his ears and into his head.

“I—I haven’t,” he tries, and tries to laugh self-abasingly, though it’s strangled and short, “I haven’t,” he repeats. “I’m angry and bitter and resentful—”

“If you’re looking for me to disagree with _those_ assertions, I’m afraid I can’t,” Castiel laughs, and Dean flushes, overcome with shame—overcome with shame at the words, that Cas believes them, and that Dean hoped, perhaps, that Cas thought of him differently, and felt for him something a fraction as beautiful as what _Dean_ feels. “Angry and bitter and resentful, yes,” Cas nods, and Dean looks away, heart tearing, but Castiel has taken a step closer to him. “But sweeter than cordial, bright as the dawn, with a kindness, a kindness in you… No matter the anger. I don’t mind it. Nor the bitterness. And by now, I think you’ve stopped resenting me, just about.”

“Just about,” Dean agrees, unable to meet Cas’s gaze.

Castiel chuckles.

“As I say, a kindness in you…”

Dean swallows. His eyes sting.

“You have a lot to offer, too, you know,” he says, dragging his gaze back to the shepherd. It’s a reluctant motion, reluctant with fear, but when his eyes meet Cas’s, he can’t regret it. “If that’s… I don’t know—something that you worry about, too. That who you are or what you have isn’t enough. You shouldn’t. Worry, I mean—you shouldn’t worry. You’re more than everything—you—” he looks down. “Someone is bound to see that,” he murmurs. “Someone _does_ see it.”

Neither speak. Dean refuses to look up again. He cannot.

Eventually, Cas softly takes his hand and tugs him onwards. Isn’t this what Dean was longing for? His fingers tighten on Castiel’s. Warm in the cool of the night.

They walk onward in silence.

The stars turn overhead, pinpricks in the sky. Light through a broken jar. The sheep are sleeping, an owl sounds from the trees, a curling, rounding call into the blueblack dark. The sound trips over the hills, the air is cool, Cas’s hand is warm, Dean’s feathered heart is achieving flight. And he’s terrified of heights. The moon, a splintered shell, is low and large. It seems to watch them, casts its expectant gaze on Dean and says _people look on me and think of love. Why can’t you be guided by it, now?_

But Dean is guided by Cas. Yet in that case—when he thinks about it—it might as well be love guiding him.

Cresting the hill, the croft comes into sight, pale in the dark, walls caught with ghostly moonlight. The sea’s surface, beyond the cliffs, is crumpled with motion. The wind lashes off of it, distantly.

“That song you sang,” Dean says, as they’re at the top of the hill. They’ve stopped momentarily, but Cas, glancing to him as he says this, pinches a worried frown, and steps forward, descending toward his home. Dean has to step quickly to catch him up.

“What about it?” Cas asks. Dean’s lungs are pricked with worry.

“It was beautiful,” Dean says. “Did you—did you learn it as a child?”

“I learnt it in my youth,” Castiel answers, not looking at him. His features are set. “My misspent youth. My travels.”

“Well—it was beautiful.”

“So you’ve said.”

Dean’s insides rile, uneasily.

“A song for a sweetheart, no doubt.”

Castiel says nothing.

Fear drenches him. What’s he doing? What’s he about to say?

“Was it a sweetheart, who taught it to you?” He asks.

“Is that important?” Castiel raises his eyebrows.

They’re nearing the croft. Castiel has increased their pace, Dean grows frustrated. He wants to speak—he needs to speak. But for all of his need, his words are wrought with trepidation, are hopeful but uneasy.

“I asked, when we first met,” Dean says, “if you had a sweetheart back in Ireland…”

“And I said that I did not.”

“But you never had one?” Dean asks, nervous. “Have you never had one?”

The bolt of Cas’s jaw tightens.

“What does it matter?”

“Is it an offensive question?” Dean asks.

Cas sighs.

“I had a sweetheart. I travelled with that sweetheart, for some time.”

“Oh,” Dean raises his eyebrows, surprised by this answer. Cas who goes to church and confession and prays before his meals… to _travel_ with a sweetheart? “And—and what happened to her?”

Cas’s eyes flash over to him. He says nothing. Dean’s heart is beginning to tear. Why the long, sustained gaze in the barn, as he sang, and why the sudden relinquishing of it, now?

“But you had a sweetheart, then,” Dean says. “Did you ever sing that song for her?”

Cas only blinks, but it seems to be in confirmation. Dean’s insides curl.

“Well, if you ever wanted to win the heart of someone new, that would be the song to sing,” Dean says, heart a hammer against his ribs. They are nearly at the croft. “And several women seemed to be won by it, completely. So if you ever find yourself lonely, or in need of a new sweetheart…”

They stop by the door, but Castiel doesn’t open it. He turns to Dean, brow heavy and earnest. He looks sad and serious.

“I have no call for sweethearts,” he says. Dean’s heart rips with the ease of poppy petals beneath the press of fingertips.

“None at all?” Dean asks, voice trembling. Cas looks up at him. He leans against the doorframe.

“Why does it concern you?” Castiel asks, but asks it after a stretch of silence and staring, only these, and the wash of the sea in the near distance, beneath the cliffs. Dean cannot answer for fear.

But he tries.

Cas’s eyes seem to search him for something. Dean surrenders to it. That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? Surrender. And isn’t love a surrendering? To your own fears, and of your own heart? The darkness embracing them tightens. So do Dean’s lungs. This is like jumping from a cliff-edge.

“Are we—aren’t we sweethearts?” He asks, finally, he manages to ask. “You and I, aren’t we sweethearts? You—you’re mine, at least. Aren’t I yours?”

Whatever the shepherd seems to have been expecting, it was not this. He blinks. His eyes shine in the dark. Dean is tempted to turn on his heel and bolt, but—but do Castiel’s eyes shine with _tears?_ They’re misty in the silver moonlight, and stung with something… something that makes Dean ache with longing. Is it longing, that they’re filled with, too?

He seems to lean forward. Maybe Dean just hopes for it. His gaze on Dean is filled with all of the intention in the world.

His fingers, grazing up Dean’s cheek, are almost startling. But then, how could Dean be scared by them? They’re _Cas’s._ And _warm_ against the cold, against his cheek. Cas’s fingers brush upwards, Dean’s skin singing at the contact, until Cas’s hand cups his face, soft, so soft. Dean is almost too afraid to lean into it, to break the perfect singing stillness of this moment.

“Aren’t we sweethearts?” Dean asks again. Cas blinks gently. This one is definitely in confirmation. “Aren’t you mine?”

“Just so,” he answers. Dean lets out a breathless laugh.

“Just so,” he repeats.

Dean walks back to the croft lightheaded, like the earth is not earth but sky, like the grass is not grass but clouds. It’s a wonder he doesn’t slip and fall, especially given his propensity to do so in the damp and dark, as he is now. But his heart is a clamour, his head is a bird far away in the heavens, he’s a whirlwind giddy thing unable to focus even on the steps he’s taking.

 _Aren’t we sweethearts?_ He’d asked, and Cas had confirmed it. _Just so. Just so._ Two words which sound, increasingly, like the determined pound of Dean’s own pulse. _Just so._

Only these words, and cupping Dean’s cheek, thumb grazing his skin. That’s all Cas did, gaze pressed soft on Dean like sunlight glinting off clouds. Then he turned, entered the croft, and Dean left. That was all. But Dean feels like the first breath of the universe. How could something so simple be so sweet?

Entering the farmhouse, he meets Sam, who’s turning up the stairs. He frowns, confused, at Dean’s faraway expression.

“Are you alright?” He asks, worried. “You look—” But he shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” Dean answers, head descending back to earth. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Sam watches him a moment. “Thanks for tidying, after tonight.”

Sam shrugs easily.

“You seemed determined to talk with Castiel.”

Dean flushes.

“We had, um—I needed to speak to him about—we needed to—” But he can’t find an excuse. Sam doesn’t seem to expect one. He lingers on the first stair, rocking his weight to and from the bannister. They speak quietly, careful not to startle any of the birds in the rooms around them. The last thing they need is a crow screeching in alarm.

“Did you know he was such a capable musician?”

“Not _that_ capable,” Dean admits.

“Maybe he could teach me the fiddle. I’ve always wanted to learn.”

“He’s very busy,” Dean says, perhaps a little too quickly, and _definitely_ too defensively. Sam rolls his eyes and turns up the stairs. Dean follows after him.

“Right, I forgot how bad you were at sharing. Even _friends.”_

Dean’s face tightens with heat.

“I—I just mean—” he stammers, then sighs. “—I’ll ask him. I’m sure he’d be happy to teach you.”

“In-between all the lessons he’s giving you?”

Dean is about to bark something out, mortified that Sam has found out about the reading lessons—did Cas _tell_ him? He feels the cold sting of betrayal to his chest—before he realises Sam is talking about shepherding.

“Well, now that I’m back working as a regular farm hand, he’ll have the time,” Dean says. They reach the top of the stairs. On the landing, Sam turns to him. It’s dark, the darkness is pale blue, the darkness makes Dean think of outside and walking to the croft with Cas and all the small and simple words they shared. “Why don’t you come with me to the croft, tomorrow night?”

“Wouldn’t that be interrupting one of your extremely exclusive, private banquets with him?”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“I’ll bring food, perhaps a little wine, and cook us all dinner. He can give you your first lesson while I do. _If_ he says yes.”

Sam twitches a smile.

“Alright.” His voice is quiet, now that they’re upstairs and so near so many bedrooms. “You haven’t cooked for me in a while.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve had cause to,” Dean points out. Back in Kansas, feeding Sam—and then Sam and Adam—was of course his responsibility. From the moment John hit the bottle, Dean had to play mother and father to Sam. And sometimes even to John. “You’ll see how much better I am, with _good_ ingredients at my disposal.”

Sam twitches a smile.

“Things have changed,” he says simply.

“They have,” Dean agrees.

“It’s good that you have someone,” Sam says, everything gentle.

“What?”

In the darkness, Sam’s eyes are soft on his.

“It’s good,” Sam repeats, “not being alone. I think that’s a good thing.”

“Right,” Dean nods, throat tight. “Yes,” he agrees. “I think it is, too.”

He turns down the corridor, face ablaze.

“Goodnight, Dean,” Sam calls quietly after him.

“Goodnight, Sammy,” Dean returns.

He enters his room and closes the door. Changing into his nightclothes, he can’t but think of Cas’s hands, imagine it’s _Cas’s_ hands undressing him. He grazes the pads of his fingertips against the skin of his neck and relishes the way it raises pinpricks in response, _particularly_ at the thought of Castiel touching him, softly, here. It took him too long to realise. Cas made it too easy, not to realise, just to sit with it, sit with the feeling unnamed and adore it and adore _Cas,_ because how could anyone not? His soft strong hands and roughened fingertips, the graceful curl of his rare smiles, the way he regards Dean, like Dean is some amusing albeit beautiful mystery from the birth of the universe—or no, not the birth of the universe. Something brand new. Cas looks at Dean like he’s brand new, and not the bruised and broken thing Dean knows himself to be.

Sam’s right. It’s good to have someone. And Cas… Cas seems—seems, of all things, glad to have _Dean._

That night, lying in his bed, his fingers curl over the place Cas grazed his hand. He cups his own cheek and closes his eyes and imagines it’s Cas’s touch on his skin, again. Distantly, the waves sound against the cliffs. Distantly, Cas must listen to them, too


	14. Goshawk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> helloooo !!! congrats to Caroline for finishing her thesis, I love you !! Well done beautiful friend, this chapter is dedicated to you <3 Proud of u !!

“So what’ll you be making us tonight, Winchester?” Cas asks, leaning beside Dean. Dean glances up at him from where he’d been taking the meat out of the paper bag he carried it in, and tries not to make it _too_ obvious that his breath is stolen. He probably fails miserably. Cas’s gaze sparks blue fire.

“Remember our first meal together?” He asks. Cas’s lips twitch.

“Woodpigeon,” Cas says, as Dean finishes unwrapping it.

“It’s been so long since I last ate any kind of bird,” Sam shakes his head, and Dean snorts.

“You’ll have to sneak over here for dinner more often,” Cas smiles, though Dean’s heart prickles defensively at this. “It’s where Dean gets his required intake of fowl.”

“Yes, he’s left that out, every time I’ve complained how much I miss eating chicken.”

“I’m just trying to respect Bobby’s love for birds,” Dean rolls his eyes. Sam snorts. “Now, weren’t you meant to have a music lesson? Or just spend the whole time leaning over my shoulder as I work?”

Sam laughs again. Cas’s fingers graze Dean’s arm before he moves away.

As Dean works, Cas teaches. The croft is warm—Cas has stoked the fire, and it smells of sage—some hangs, fresh, and ready to be dried, just above the fire.

He glances up every now and then to the shepherd and his brother. Sometimes Cas’s gaze meets his. Dean smiles, heart trilling, every time.

After he’s prepared the meat, stuffing it with garlic mustard, he sets to roasting it alongside a few potatoes and carrots. As they roast, he pours himself, Cas, and Sam a glass of wine.

“I hear people play fiddle better when they’re a little drunk,” he says, passing a glass to Cas. Sam, holding the fiddle and bow, is unable to take one yet.

“Oh, you would’ve had me believe that as you fed me your devil-drink, last night,” Cas rolls his eyes. Sam frowns.

“While Cas was playing for us,” Dean explains to his brother, “— _very_ well, I might add—” Cas snorts at this, taking a sip of his wine, “—I helped him drink a little something to soothe any nerves he might’ve had. Which was a _favour,_ by the—”

“He spiked my cider with _rum,”_ Castiel interrupts, informing Sam matter-of-factly. Dean grins. Sam glances over to Dean with a soft, perceptive smile.

“You know,” Sam says, “it’s been a while since Dean’s played any pranks, made any mischief. He _used_ to do it all the time. But not in a while.”

“Well, may the days of Mr Winchester’s humourlessness soon return,” Cas shakes his head solemnly. Dean threatens to pour his wine down Cas’s shirt. “Not so soon as _that,”_ Cas dodges. Dean laughs.

“You should be glad you brought it back,” Dean says. Sam smiles.

“So it _was_ Castiel who brought it back.”

Dean flushes. But Cas is smiling.

“Perhaps it was the beautiful English weather.”

“Oh, for sure,” Dean says dryly, “famously sunny and uplifting.”

“You wait until the summer, Dean,” Cas replies, voice roughened with the crumbling shale of the cliffs. “Perhaps we’ll even be able to go swimming, one day soon.”

Dean smiles. He likes that thought. He likes the thought of salt-wet skin and another excuse to watch Cas’s form, admire every motion and moment of movement. He likes the thought of cool waters on skin and a warm honeyed sun beaming down at them, bathing them in light. He likes the thought of it slipping slowly down beyond the veil of the sea, of finally climbing out of the tossing waves with Castiel, to the privacy of a secluded cove, of pulling clothes back onto skin sticky with seawater so that their shirts cling to their chests, of walking back to the croft in the sunset, hands tangled.

God, he longs for it.

“Sure,” he answers.

“Adam would _love_ that.”

Dean flushes and turns back to the table.

“He would,” he agrees. He swallows.

Cas said love was not possession. So why does Dean resent every time he has to share him?

Sam’s music lesson continues. Being as clever as he is, he doesn’t sound half bad by the time dinner is ready. Sam takes what’s ordinarily Dean’s seat, and so Dean finds himself with an excuse to seat himself at the head of the table, adjacent to Cas, and with his knee grazing Cas’s.

They finish the wine easily, and Cas, smirking as Dean frowns at his empty cup, gets up and places a large bottle on the table.

“What’s this?” Dean asks.

“Honey mead,” Cas answers. “Next time, remind yourself to bring more to drink. You’re lucky I consider this a special enough occasion for us to drink this.”

“Oh, Cas, you spoil us.”

“No doubt,” the shepherd assents.

The drink is deep and sweet and tastes of spices as well as honey. It flowers on Dean’s lips even as it feels like it drags his tongue to the bottom of his mouth.

“You _do_ spoil us,” he exclaims after his first sip, looking from the drink in his hand up to Cas. “This is delicious.”

“Perhaps I’ll teach you how to make it.”

 _“More_ lessons?” Dean raises his eyebrows with a laugh.

“Is he paying you for these?” Sam asks, lips quirked in his small, signature bemused smile.

“With the pleasure of his company,” Cas answers, eyes fixed warmly on Dean, whose cheeks heat. Only a few nights ago, he would’ve blamed this on the alcohol he’s been drinking, but now he knows better. God, he’s had a blinkered vision, unable to see his own heart, let alone understand it.

 _I have been deaf to the song of my own heart._ That’s what Cas said, that night he cleft his chest open and heaved out his beating heart _and_ beating past up for Dean. Dean hadn’t understood what he meant, then. Blinkered vision, again. But he does now.

“I wasn’t aware that was legal tender,” Sam smirks, and Cas barks out a laugh.

“No, perhaps not,” he admits. “But it’s valuable to me.”

Dean’s ears prickle. He stares down at his food.

“You’ll tire of it soon…” He murmurs to his plate.

“I doubt I could,” Cas answers. His knee bumps Dean’s beneath the table. Dean’s heart staggers into his throat.

If Sam notices, he doesn’t say so. He asks Cas about music in Ireland, where and how he learnt to play, what songs he learnt as a child. Cas seems happier than normal to speak of his past—but perhaps speaking of music is much like listening to it. Some soft comfort to easing an aching life.

“Dean, for all the lessons you’re getting from Castiel, you won’t ask him to teach you music, too?” Sam asks.

Dean quirks a smile, self-conscious, and shakes his head.

“When it comes to music, I’d much rather be in the audience, and watch Cas,” he says, then reddens, and looks down, and shovels food into his mouth.

“You know he’s a fair singer though, Cas?” Sam asks, turning back to the shepherd. “He’s definitely capable.”

“I’ve heard him sing,” Cas smiles, “and I agree. He’s a fine singer.”

“Perhaps you could duet, come the next dance.”

“I don’t have the stomach for it,” Dean answers quickly.

“One night,” Cas starts, leaning forward to speak to Sam. His eyes spark in a way which doesn’t bode well for Dean. “One night, quite early in my time here, I caught Mr Winchester stumbling along the cliff edge, blind drunk—”

“I was not _blind_ drunk,” Dean scowls, but Cas ignores him.

“—And singing to himself as he roamed. He was returning from a night with Lafitte and Henriksen, as I recall, from the pub in town. Well, they must’ve been playing the music of _my_ homeland, there, that night, because he was singing an Irish sailing song, when I spotted him. But he’d had too many—blind drunk, as I say—and slipped, and fair carved his hand open on some exposed rock.” Sam laughs, though he looks worried, and shakes his head. “Shale,” Cas says, and nods seriously to Sam, whose eyes are flickering with amusement, “you see,” and he tuts. “Splinters something terrible. And it did.”

“And it did,” Dean agrees.

“Dean, you didn’t tell me _that’s_ how you cut your hand,” Sam laughs, but again, something in it is frayed with concern. “Walking along a cliff, drunk—you could’ve—”

“I was fine,” Dean rolls his eyes.

“Well, because you had Castiel looking out for you,” Sam answers, and Dean groans, leaning back. Cas obviously suppresses a smirk at Dean’s grumpiness. “And then what happened?” Sam asks.

“He’d also hurt his foot, if you recall, during his pitch toward the ground. He cursed to high heaven—”

“I did _not,”_ Dean bites.

“But you did curse.”

“Not to _high_ heaven.”

“To the clouds, then—”

“—Only those low in the sky. _Maybe.”_

Cas chuckles. His knee brushes Dean’s again.

“Well, I helped him back to the croft, and patched him over. And then I helped him back to the farmhouse, though he worked, hard, at refusing that assistance.”

“He’s stubborn, for sure,” Sam comments.

“Believe me, I’ve learnt.”

“But he doesn’t always let people see to his wounds,” Sam says, “even me. Believe it or not, but he must trust you a lot, to let you tend to his. Must have trusted you, even then.”

Cas’s eyes flit to Dean’s. Dean’s cheeks are heated, he tries to shrink himself, make himself less noticeable, but with only three of them round the table, it’s not to much avail.

“I hope I never cease to deserve it,” Cas says. Dean swallows. Looks down. Sam complements Dean on the meal, and the conversation moves on.

…

He and Cas harvest mussels down beneath the rocks. Madra joins them, clambering over great stones with a lot more ease than Dean—Cas laughs at his uneven steps, which Dean glares at, but hardly cares about. Cas’s hands come round Dean’s body every time he slips, and are so sturdy and warm he almost starts slipping deliberately.

“It’s not my fault,” Dean laughs.

“Madra seems to cope just fine.”

“She has more points of contact,” Dean points out, and Cas offers a charitable laugh. The wind, more fresh off the sea than it is even above the cliffs, weaves through Cas’s dark hair. It’s beautiful like this, roughed-up tufts of hair which is, even ordinarily, unkempt. “And she’s lower down than me. Closer to the ground. More stable.”

“And what about me?” Cas raises his eyebrows, raising his voice above the flush and billow of the wind. “I’m not losing _my_ footing.”

“Same principle,” Dean grins.

“I’m not four-legged, Mr Winchester.”

Dean barks out a laugh.

“No,” he admits, “but you’re closer to the ground than me.”

Castiel frowns.

“By the smallest margin—”

“By at _least_ two inches—”

“Not _two—”_

“At _least_ two,” Dean laughs. “If not, more.”

Cas frowns. And the expression is lovely.—Though of course Cas doesn’t mean it to be.

Dean laughs again.

“You look so _sour,_ at hearing that.”

“I hope your freakishly long legs make you slip off this rock,” Cas says, and Dean laughs so hard he nearly does.

“Careful not to cut your hands on their shells,” Cas says, glancing back at Dean as he twists and pulls the darkened, silvery and blue-black shells from the rock. “Their edges are sharp.”

“I’ll pay the same care as I do around your wit, then.”

“I see you’ve been sharpening yours,” Cas comments.

“If I _do_ cut myself, it’s some comfort that you’ll be there to nurse my wounds.”

Cas huffs, though he smiles at the rock he harvests from.

They carry big buckets of shellfish back up to the croft, and that night clean and cook the mussels. The sky turns watercolour shades of darkening blue, there is no sunset to watch, only a beautiful and gradual retreating of light. By the time their mussels have been cooked, the sky is black, and the candles are lambent amber against it.

Their reading lesson comes just after. Again, Cas’s hand comes to press at Dean’s back as he treads, steadily, through the words on the page, or writes out with slow intention new and unfamiliar words into his notepad. Each time Cas makes him laugh his head comes to tip onto Cas’s shoulder, and now the action is weighted and more than just innate, now Dean knows why he barely thinks before tipping his head to rest there. But now, Cas’s hand ends up grazing higher, so that his fingertips can trace up and down Dean’s neck, so that pinpricks are raised all along the length of Dean, and so that he has to think harder about breathing than he ever has in his life, who knew _breath_ was a conscious effort? More conscious than letting your head fall onto the warm shoulder of another man, as you laugh at the rough rumble of his jokes?

Dean wants to kiss him. Itches to kiss him. Wants to taste the golden ale they drank, this evening, on Cas’s lips.

Instead he has to keep reading, pretend that the touch of the shepherd’s fingers on Dean’s neck don’t make him want to curl, tight, into Cas’s arms; pretend that the touch doesn’t make his eyes droop, or his heart melt into his chest.

Is this intentional of Cas? Is Cas thinking as he does this?

Dean looks up from his page and over to the shepherd. He blinks. Cas’s fingers stop their grazing. Instead they move, curl, warm and soft and firm, round the back of Dean’s neck, and offer him a tender squeeze.

“You’ve stopped reading,” he observes, and Dean continues staring.

“I have,” he confirms.

“May I enquire as to why?”

Dean aches.

“Why do you do this?” Dean asks, voice barely raised above the sound of the candles flickering on their stems. Cas blinks. “Why do you—you teach me, without pay, touch me, with so much care, talk to me, so tenderly? What am I doing in return? What could I possibly do in return?”

Cas laughs. Dean wants to recoil, but the shepherd’s hand is still firm at the back of his neck.

“Never ask me to leave,” Cas answers. “That, and you, are enough.”

“That’s not true.”

“You asked, and I answered,” Cas replies, words laced with amusement and exasperation. “I ought to have known that you wouldn’t believe me. It is, nonetheless, the truth.”

“I’ve never felt like this,” Dean blurts out, before he can close his mouth to stay his tongue. Castiel blinks tenderly.

“No?” He asks.

“Not for a man,” Dean says, and reddens, because this is, yet, more explicit and transparent than anything they’ve said to one another, “nor anyone. Isn’t that strange.”

Cas watches Dean.

“Have you—have you felt like this, before?” Dean asks, nervously, then realises with a jolt of dread that this is a big _if,_ an assumption that Cas _does_ feel, whatever ‘this’ is. But there’s a guard to it, too, some security: ‘this’ is broad. It could mean anything.

“I’m sure I’ve thought I’ve felt it,” Cas answers, and Dean’s heart pricks, disappointed.

“Oh…” Dean blinks, looking away.

“But _thinking_ it is one thing,” Castiel continues, and Dean glances back up. “Feeling it is quite another. I was a reckless youth. You know this.”

“I can’t imagine you as reckless,” Dean states, truthfully. “You’re the most steadfast thing I know.” He means it from the very soil of his soul.

“All I know now, Dean,” Castiel says, and his fingers graze the short hairs at the base of Dean’s neck, “is that you’re the earth from which the rest of my heart may grow.”

Dean crumbles like chalk.

Still, they don’t kiss. Dean aches to know the taste of Castiel against him. By lambing season, with the tulips and daffodils lighting like lanterns among the grass, Dean is digging his nails into his palms, casting little crescent moons across his skin, at the sight of Cas’s mouth. Is he misreading? All this time, has he been misreading, mishearing? Dean helps deliver the lambs, Adam and Jo occasionally join them, generally wrinkling their noses but excited about the newborns once they’ve been cleaned enough to appear cute. He watches Cas’s hands and wants them on _his_ skin, wants them cradling his jaw or curling tight around his bare shoulders. It’s like it’s always dawn in Dean’s heart, a constant breath in. It’s too drawn out. He aches.

One bright morning, as Dean is repairing a spoke on one of the carts, a silhouette passes over the bright disc of the sun and haloes its light around the figure. Dean squints up, and recognises the outline of the shepherd, whose form, and eyes, and mouth, had just been tattooed against Dean’s thoughts.

“Oh,” he says, still squinting, covering his eyes with one of his hands as the white light of the sun glints round the corners of Cas’s frame. The sky above him is broad and blue, a sheet of colour.

“Oh?” Cas repeats, eyebrows raised. “What kind of greeting is that?”

“Sorry,” Dean shakes his head, “no kind of greeting. I was miles away.” He glances down at his hands, dirtied and spattered with oil. “Good morning.”

“And to you,” the shepherd nods. “Do you need a hand?”

Dean sighs and rises, wiping his hands on a rag.

“No, but I could use a break,” he answers. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, it seems mine and Madra’s break coincided with yours.”

“Madra?” Dean raises his eyebrows. “I don’t see her.”

“Oh, Sam saw us coming, and kindly took her off my hands.” Cas’s eyes spark.

“How gracious of him,” Dean laughs.

“He’s a charitable young man.”

“Yes, if you’re a dog.”

Cas shakes his head, eyes creased.

“I know Madra’s grateful for the love he gives her. He must think I _starve_ her of attention.”

“Anyone who knows you, knows what a heart you have, and how soft it is,” Dean tugs Castiel from the cart and out, over the fields, towards the woods in the distance. “I spotted some dryad’s saddle,” he explains to Cas’s quizzical look at Dean’s sudden intention. “I thought it might add some bulk, to whatever we have for dinner?”

“You’re becoming too proficient at this business of identification,” Cas says warmly. Dean laughs, and slips his hand into Castiel’s as the distance grows between them and the Eyrie.

“You’ll have to tell me if I’m right, first,” he reminds.

“I’ve every faith in you.”

“Every faith, until I poison us both.”

“Yes, and if you were dead, too, I wouldn’t even be able to haunt you,” Cas shakes his head sadly.

“You’d haunt me if you died?” Dean asks, turning to him with a broad smile.

“You sound… strangely touched,” Castiel squints.

“Of course—ghosts only haunt the people they _really_ care about.”

 _“Care_ is an odd word to use, in this instance.”

“But it’s still true,” Dean points about.

Castiel shakes his head.

“You aren’t half absurd, Dean Winchester.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Dean counters. “Every time we speak, I only think you stranger.”

“How cruel of you.”

“Do you remember those first conversations we had,” Dean starts, chest bound too tight to contain the swelling of his heart, “those early days, when you’d first arrived? When I was—”

“Um, somewhat antagonistic?” Cas finishes for him. Dean laughs.

“Yes, then,” he confirms. Cas’s eyes glint.

“I remember,” he answers. “I couldn’t soon forget such iciness towards me. The memory of that chill is what wakes me up, each morning.”

“Cas,” Dean says, worriedly. Cas chuckles, and his fingers, tangled with Dean’s, flex softly. Is he squeezing Dean’s hand?

They’ve approached the line of the trees. Now that they’re here, Dean’s heart swells with courage. Perhaps this is the place, this is the soil on which Dean will be able to brush his lips on Cas’s. How will it feel, how will he feel? He can’t begin to imagine. A burst of golden light. A singing like the lilt of birds at dawn.

“Cas,” Dean says again, ready to turn and face his friend, but a sound distracts his. The rag-torn cry of a bird, and Bobby cursing.

Both of them start.

Just beyond them, through the weave of the woods, and in a clearing, Bobby nurses a bleeding hand, and in the other, a length of rope from which a great, prehistoric looking thing bates and thrashes, a pulse of wings like the steady lash of waves on surf.

“Bloody hell,” Mick shakes his head and stands back far enough that only now does Dean spot him. “Mr Singer, don’t take this the wrong way, but is it possible that you’ve bitten off a _little_ more than you can chew, with this one?”

It looks it.

“Is that—the hell is that?” Dean asks, awestruck. A bullet-braid of bird.

The creature is longer and narrower than the redtailed hawks of his home, it looks angrier and uglier by far than them—but then, Dean reasons, he’d be angry too, if he were some great raptor lurched out of the sky and pulled to earth by an aging drunk from Kansas and a scrawny man from the east end of London. But that’s just it—how did they drag the creature from the clouds?

“Give me a hand, boy, and stop asking stupid question,” Bobby growls, as the bird bates again. It’s panicked, risking tangling itself in the creance, and Dean scowls at Bobby’s tone.

“Which would be easier, if you stopped doing stupid things,” Dean quips.

“It’s a _bird—”_

“Oh, thanks.”

“It’s a hawk,” Cas cuts in, and strides towards Bobby with silent grace, so that at least the bird doesn’t seem to panic more at his approach than it already is. “Have you a rufter?” He asks, taking the creance from Bobby, unlooping its knots from the hawks terrifying looking feet with quick hands which steer clear of the birds talons, and winding the rope tighter before the hawk can become any more tangled.

“Mick,” Bobby, looking irritated at Cas taking over, nods over to Davies, who frowns at Cas’s expectant expression.

“The hell’s a rufter?”

“That leather hood, in your hand, Mr Davies,” Cas sighs. He glances back to Bobby. “This hawk has a broken leg,” he says seriously.

“We think he’s an escapee,” Mick says. “Some high lord’s pet.”

“Oh, and there are a lot of high lords around here?” Dean raises his eyebrows.

“He has _wings,”_ Mick drawls, squinting at Dean, who squints back. “He could’ve travelled.”

“Pet, most likely,” Cas says, taking the hood from Mick when it is finally handed to him, “if ‘pet’ could ever be the word for such a creature. But not he.”

“Huh?”

“This is a she. Look at her eyes.”

“What do you mean, look at her eyes?” Mick grimaces. The bird, giant as she is, is beginning to tire herself out against Cas’s steady hold. Dean does as Cas suggests, though it isn’t easy, what with all the bird’s movements.

“What am I looking for?” Dean asks.

“What colour are those eyes?” Cas asks, when, as the bird finally calms, he raises her to stand on his arm.

“Uh, angry?” Dean raises his eyebrows.

 _“Yellow,”_ Cas corrects. “And the males’ eyes are red.”

The thing, prehistoric and furious, would only be _more_ scary with red eyes. Dean’s glad it’s a girl.

“And her plumage is brown. Another giveaway.”

“Are you a falconer, Mr Novak?” Bobby asks, and sounds both impressed and somewhat jealous. That resentful edge hasn’t retreated from his tone, yet, for Cas being the one to rescue the bird, in the end. Cas lowers the hood softly over her head, and she starts, but stays still.

“No,” he answers. “But I’m familiar enough with the practice.”

“Of course you are,” Dean laughs warmly. “What _don’t_ you know?”

Cas rolls his eyes.

“What are your plans with her, Mr Singer?” He asks.

“What are my plans with any of my birds?” Bobby glares. “I’m going to take care of her.”

“Taking care of her might mean _not_ taking care of your other birds,” Cas answers.

“Bobby can multitask,” Dean protests, “he’s taken care of dozens of birds at a time, before.”

“Yes, and what do you think eats dozens of birds?” Cas asks. But Bobby is already walking, however slowly over the knotted roots underfoot as he finds secure holding for each walking stick with his steps, back to the Eyrie.

“I’ll keep her separate from the others,” Bobby says, but seems to say it more to himself than in answer to Cas. “She’ll have her own room.”

“Of course,” Castiel rolls his eyes.

“And what room will that be?” Mick asks. Dean is suspicious he’s egging Bobby on. No. More than suspicious. Certain.

“My study,” Bobby answers, quickly. “That way I can keep an eye on her, get her used to me.”

“Great,” Dean mutters. A new obsession.

“I’m sure she’ll make a fine companion,” Cas says, uncertainly.

“As am I,” Bobby answers.

Cas walks slowly to keep the injured raptor steady on his arm. She only rests on one of her great talons.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Dean asks softly, gesturing to the iron grip her claw has around his forearm. “Aren’t you supposed to have a—I don’t know—glove?”

“I’ll live,” Cas shrugs—though Dean doubts it, if the bird’s great claws slash one of his arteries. He watches worriedly, glad that at least Castiel wears a thick, beaten jacket today.

“How is it that you’ve come to know about _everything?”_ Dean asks, earnestly. Cas glances at him, flickering amusement.

“I’m very old,” he says, dryly.

“But not nearly as eccentric as Bobby,” Dean grins. Cas flashes him a look which tells him off for not disagreeing. Dean laughs.

In the farmhouse, Dean and Mick are set removing the other birds and cages from Bobby’s study, while Castiel takes the goshawk through to one of the only birdless, and therefore safe rooms downstairs: the kitchen. Ellen protests with loud offense, but Bobby is already clearing space on the kitchen table for Castiel to lay the bird down and work on fashioning a splint for her broken leg. Ellen’s complaints sound loudly down the corridor as Dean and Mick heave wire cages from Bobby’s study to the parlour. Back in the study, Castiel frowns and shakes his head at the perch Dean brings in for the bird.

“What’s the problem?” Dean asks, defensive.

“Goshawks hunt high up. There’s comfort in height. If the perch is lower than anything else she could perch on, this one won’t sit on it.”

Dean sighs.

“So we need a higher perch?”

“Unless you want the bird clambering over every piece of Bobby’s furniture,” Cas answers. “There’s home in height, for a goshawk.”

“I don’t care what the bird does,” Dean answers honestly. “If _I_ were the hawk, I’d want to climb as high up as possible, and take a massive shit on Bobby for trapping me—”

Bobby shoos him out the room to fetch a higher perch.

When Dean is back, the bird is placed on the perch, and Bobby smiles at her. She’s still, but cocks her head minutely at every reverberation of sound or movement, every breath from any of them. Some constant state of heightened sense. Dean shakes his head.

“Is she gonna be happy here?” He asks.

“Not at first,” Castiel answers. “She’ll hate it. But after getting used to it…”

“She’ll love it. Enough with these ill portents,” Bobby grumbles. Castiel frowns at the phrase _love,_ and Dean agrees. Is it a word for a creature like this?

“Have you any books on falconry?” Cas asks, turning to Bobby. Bobby bristles.

“Probably,” he answers. Dean sighs.

“Well,” he rolls his eyes, “maybe you can hire Cas to teach you some basics, until we find further instruction.”

“Does he make _you_ pay for your lessons with him?”

“Fine, _I’ll_ pay for Cas to teach you falconry—”

“—That’s not necessary,” Cas soothes, but Dean rolls his eyes and tugs the shepherd out of the room.

“Come on, Cas,” he murmurs. “You can come back later. Give Bobby a chance to get acquainted with the latest testimony to his insanity.”

Cas is biting his lip, and Dean suspects it’s to stifle a smirk. He drags Cas into the kitchen, where Ellen is definitely giving Castiel some kind of evil eye for bringing the bird in. There’s a feather, bent from panic, at the kitchen table.

“Want a drink?” Dean asks. Cas assents with a smile, and Dean makes one for Ellen to soothe her temper, before reordering the kitchen table as she would have had it before the interruption which the goshawk must have presented to it. By the time they sit down at the table, she’s placated enough to join them.

“So you know about goshawks,” Dean smiles, wrapping his hands round his cup.

“Only a little,” Cas says, and glances an apologetic eye to Ellen. “Sparrowhawks—they were what my—”

But he cuts himself off.

“What’s the difference?” Dean asks.

“Goshawks are bigger,” Cas answers. “Angrier, too. And they look it.”

“Or Bobby’s did,” Dean laughs, “but to be fair to her, _I’d_ be angry, too. Imagine,” Dean provides, and Ellen chuckles and shakes her head, “you’re up there, queen of the sky, unrivalled—let’s say you’ve just escaped the tyrannical thumb of _one_ farmer, and then some new farmer—one who isn’t even a gentleman, like your old master—literally seizes you and takes you for his own. I’d look grumpy, too.”

Cas sighs affectionately.

“Well, whether she’s a right to it or not, you’ll find that angry expression of hers a rather permanent fixture. A sparrowhawk has an opener face. Softer. Kinder.”

“And that’s the bird you prefer?” Dean asks.

“I’ve little experience with goshawks,” Cas admits. “It’d be wrong to make a judgement, yet. They’re not a fashionable bird,” he says. “Nearly extinct, here. And considered vermin, by most. Whoever kept this one as a pet has an acquired taste.”

“Why are they unfashionable?” Ellen raises her eyebrows.

“As I said,” Cas shrugs, “they’re angry creatures. They’ve a temper. They’re murderous—people think falcons have a grace, a nobility. But goshawks are bloody, and bloody angry creatures. And you can fly them anywhere. They’re the layman’s bird, and to the English, and their rigid class lines, there’s some shame in that.”

“So why would people train them, at all?” Dean raises his eyebrows.

Cas chuckles.

“Ask Mr Singer.”

“Cas, I mean it.”

“They’re secretive,” Cas says, “mysterious, therefore. They choose who they share their lives with and are resentful of anyone who tries to know them. For some,” Cas shrugs again, “there’s some charm in that. In the investment they present. I know that I’ve been charmed by mysterious, angry creatures before.”

Dean’s heart pangs.

“And you thought those creatures were worth pursuing?” He asks. Cas twitches a smile.

“Every day I am rewarded for it.”

Ellen sighs, apparently unaware of the look catching between Dean and Castiel.

“Well, good luck to Bobby. But he’s _not_ bringing that creature back in the kitchen.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Castiel turns again to Ellen. “A goshawk, injured or not, would’ve set the birds in cages into a flurry of panic. And who knows the damage she might’ve caused, broken leg or not. I thought it best to take her in a room _without_ other birds in.”

“You’re hard pressed to find those around here,” Ellen rolls her eyes.

“We’re lucky the folk in town nicknamed this place the Eyrie, and not Bedlam,” Dean laughs. Ellen grunts her assent. The shepherd hums, amused.

Under the table, Cas’s hand has drifted to Dean’s knee. Dean swallows, heart a hawk, high in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for now :) lots of love x


	15. House Sparrows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi oops forgot to say hi first time round. anyway, hi !! big chapter ahead

Easter Sunday arrives. Ellen teaches Adam how to dye eggs using cranberries and lemon rind. Bobby has named his goshawk Cathy— _Cathy—_ and spends most of his time sat with her, getting her used to him. They all have to be quiet around his study, at the front of the house, so as not to startle her, and Bobby glares at anyone who speaks above a murmur within ten metres of the door. Naturally, he glares at Mick a lot. He doesn’t trust Madra, who’s never had a problem with any of the birds in this house before, so why would she now? But Bobby glowers and closes his study door firmly whenever she’s in the Eyrie.

Cas stays for lunch, and then stays late, Dean thrilling as the hours slip by, as it grows ever darker outside, as the shadows thicken and skein beyond the window panes. He wills the time forward, glances at the clock on the mantle, as he and Castiel and Madra are left, the only occupants of the house still awake. All around them, the sleeping forms of birds, and upstairs, the sleeping forms of people. If enough time passes, he can persuade Cas not to bother returning to the croft, but to stay here. And he can, maybe, feel those arms like bands wrapped around him again as they sleep.

“You still haven’t told me how you came to know about falconry,” Dean says, learning forward. They sit in the drawing room, Mardra coiled in a tight ball at their feet. The sound of her breathing makes Dean’s heart feel warm and loosened. And time slips between them like water on a sun-warmed pavement.

“Came to be _acquainted_ with,” Castiel corrects, and Dean rolls his eyes.

“Come on, Cas,” he grumbles, though he smiles, “what, you want to keep it a secret?”

But Cas’s expression suggests that yes, he does. The bow-quiver of his brow stays steady and set.

Dean raises his own eyebrows.

“Seriously?”

“I should return to my home,” Cas says, shifting in his seat, but Dean stays him with a hand, and he thinks of a stone thrown into waters and sinking, slowly, surely.

“What?—No,” he shakes his head, “you can stay here. Stay, here. Let’s talk a little longer.”

“It’s growing late—”

“It _is_ late,” Dean points out. And it is. The night clasps tight and heavy as tar around them. “And you let me stay in the croft, that time.”

“It was _snowing—”_

“Stay here. We’ve certainly the space for it.”

“And where would I stay?”

Dean presses his lips together, defensive.

“With me.”

Cas blinks and the motion of his lashes is like the heavy wingeats of a heron.

“You want that?”

Dean looks down to his hand, resting on Cas’s forearm. He drifts it down to tangle Cas’s fingers with his. Cas watches, too, all fascination and wonder.

“How could you doubt it?” Dean asks with a laugh. Cas huffs.

“Sometimes doubt is what keeps us safe,” he answers. Dean looks up.

“What do you mean?”

“I learnt about falconry from my sweetheart,” he answers, and Dean’s heart pricks with a pale green jealousy, and he almost unweaves his hand from Castiel’s. “The sweetheart I travelled with.”

“Oh,” Dean says, and he looks down, cheeks flushed. He thinks of himself, and how before Cas taught him, he couldn’t even _read._ Of how to sign his name he scratched out the letters he had committed to memory as shapes, not as sounds, printed in his mind as symbols, but not as their meanings. How when Bobby’s letter arrived, inviting them to England, Dean had recognised his name on its address and little to nothing else, and handed it to Sam with an excuse that he had to run an errand, and that Sam should read and relay what was inside to him. He thinks of himself and his stubbornness and resentment and poison blood and ugly rage, and he thinks of the strange and enchanting mystery a woman who could talk to birds, or at least train them, must have presented to Castiel. No wonder he’d been in love with her, no wonder he’d ran away with her. He would never run away with Dean, what does Dean present, represent? Nothing. Nothing good. Nothing good enough to catch on the wind with, and travel wherever it might take you. Dean is barely worth resting with—let alone taking to like a gale. “She must have,” Dean tries, “she sounds—well—it’s little wonder you loved her…”

Cas peers at him a minute, as if making a decision. Then he says,

“Him.”

“What?”

Dean blinks. And Castiel continues his sharing.

“Him,” Castiel repeats. “He.”

Dean’s heart stops. His hand is still wrapped around Castiel’s. His jaw hangs.

“Him,” he repeats, and Castiel nods, and looks, of all things, fearful. “He,” he says, and Castiel nods again. “Your sweetheart was—was a—”

“A man. Or,” Castiel amends with a wry and nervous chuckle, “as we were both so young, then, perhaps still a boy, a lad.”

“Oh,” Dean says, breathless. Cas watches him. “I’m—I’m a—I’m a man, too.”

The shepherd blinks, and seems perplexed by this statement, which Dean can’t blame him for.

“I’d noticed,” he answers earnestly.

Dean laughs, and still cannot inhale.

“I’ve never—” he says, fumbles, and blinks fearfully, “I’ve only ever—” he can’t find the words. “Was it nice, with a man?” He asks, then flushes deep, and Cas laughs, this time, bemused.

“I’d know nothing of how it compares with a woman,” he says, and Dean blinks again. The fire crackles, a dance of sound and sight on the air of the room. The sound presses Dean closer to Castiel, he wants to bury himself in those arms, and say _make me your new sweetheart. Don’t talk of your old one. I’m here, now. Angry and bitter as I am, aren’t I better than nothing? I’m sorry I can’t tame the birds—but I can, and do, love you. Is that enough?_

“Oh—you’ve never—”

“And never wanted to,” Cas answers, frank and soft and even. Now that the ‘him’ is out, he seems steadier, steadier than ever, as though he’s let out a breath and can now think and act evenly.

Dean nods, looking away, mouth still hanging open. He glances back to Castiel, who yet watches him.

“I’ve wanted both,” Dean says, and his chest constricts as soon as he says the words. “I’ve wanted both,” he repeats.

Cas blinks.

“You mean…”

“Men and women,” Dean answers, and feels how Cas’s voice sounds. Steadier than before. “Women and men.”

“And now?” Cas asks. Dean frowns, confused. “What do you want, now?” Cas clarifies.

Dean swallows.

“You,” he answers, and it laces a smile onto Cas’s features as he says it. “I want you.”

He takes Cas’s hand as they climb up the stairs. Madra clambers sleepily after them. Dean is breathless and quiet, but when, in his room, he turns to Castiel to kiss him, kiss him for the first time, his blood made magma with want, Cas only threads a hand through Dean’s hair and grazes a thumb on his cheek. The shepherd’s hands push him back, away, steadily. Firmly. No kiss. Dean’s lips don’t even get as close as an inch to Cas’s. What’s Dean doing wrong? Lee had wanted to kiss him immediately, had wanted more than kisses, they’d been pressed up against each other with want and the want of more than kisses, when they were discovered. Why doesn’t Cas want more? Why doesn’t he even want Dean’s lips? Dean wants Cas’s everything.

Almost shaking with longing and disappointment, Dean hands Castiel nightclothes and gets into his own, and makes less effort than he has before to avoid watching as Cas changes. Cas notices, eyes flicking up to Dean’s and sparking with bright amusement—but he does nothing else. Nothing else with the knowledge that Dean wants him, _wants_ him, and wants him close.

Cas’s arms weave round Dean’s chest when he climbs into bed. Dean had turned his back to the shepherd, eyes shining angrily, but Cas either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. More likely the latter. He notices everything, and is patient with it all. His limbs are warm and heavy and Dean melts into the touch in spite of himself.

Cas’s breath is soft against the shell of Dean’s ear.

“Bobby works hard on not startling his bird,” Cas murmurs against Dean. “You’ll see. Goshawks are beautiful, but flighty things. The trick is to be gentle, even with something which isn’t always gentle, itself.”

The hell is the shepherd talking about?

“Right,” Dean shakes his head, frowning into the darkness.

“He’ll need to be patient as the seasons,” Cas says, and Dean’s heart is almost breaking with want. “Do you think he can manage?”

 _“Bobby?”_ Dean asks. “He’s not a notoriously patient man.”

Cas chuckles.

“Perhaps,” he admits. “But people have been patient, with much harder things,” he hums. He squeezes Dean’s body, as if expecting a response. “Isn’t that so?”

Dean sleeps well, in spite of the weight of all his wanting. Cas’s arms are heavier against his chest, a burden he wants to be buried with, he can’t help but delight in the press against him.

That evening, he and Benny and Victor go to the pub in town. He invites Cas, but politely, Cas turns him down, with some excuse of needing to make new tools in the forge, including new horseshoes per Bobby’s request. Everything between them now is spun with lightning—or at least it is on Dean’s side. Electricity sears and surges beneath his skin all the day, it ripples and rivets along his limbs and every time Cas smiles at him it sparks to the surface, he can barely contain his lurching wanting now, even in the company of others, and surely they must notice, or will notice soon.

They stumble back along the cliffs, late, Dean’s mind printed with the memory of him slipping and Cas binding his hand together and how Dean still has the bandage, like the print of letters on the pages Cas teaches him to read from. Everything returns to Cas, all his thoughts, all his words, Dean is like the turning inside-out of water into waves and Cas is like the shore. He walks a little ahead of Victor and Benny, and eventually, the croft comes into sight.

“There’s the house of our reclusive shepherd,” Henrikson smiles. Dean glances back at him.

“Not so reclusive,” Dean frowns.

“No, not when it comes to you.”

Dean flushes, and turns back.

“Well, I’m going to pay him a visit,” he answers.

“The hour’s late.”

“But there’s a light in the forge,” Dean points. “He’s awake.”

Benny rolls his eyes, and tugs Victor not in the direction of the croft, but of the distant, small cottage which is the accommodation of some of the farm hands.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, Dean,” he says. “Don’t stay up too late. We’ve a busy day.”

Dean huffs, but wishes them goodnight. He walks toward the croft, the light from the forge growing bigger. He can hear the clang of hammering within.

There’s no door, only the gap where one should be, which doesn’t seem to matter much because of the heat which hits Dean the moment he steps in. He leans around the empty doorframe and watches, only watches, for a stretch: time yawns for the time Dean wastes watching the shepherd. Cas’s right hand around the hammer, clenched tight so that the fine muscles show in his arm with every swing. Cas’s face, heated determination and a fine sheen of sweat over his features. Smears of coal on Cas’s forearms which Dean wishes he could touch. He watches, only watches, enchanted. And when at last he can speak, he says,

“Ah, Sunflower,” with a smile.

Cas turns, though he doesn’t start. Had he known Dean was there?

His features curve warmly.

“You’ve returned from your outing,” Cas observes, as Dean steps in properly.

“Returned to you,” he confirms. Castiel chuckles.

“Drunk?” He asks softly.

“No,” Dean laughs, cheeks heated. “I didn’t trip on the way home, once.”

“Ah, but your face has some heat to it,” Cas holds out a hand to graze the backs of his fingers against Dean’s face. “That’ll be from wine, I’m sure. Or something heavier.”

“Or from the heat of this forge, or from you,” Dean answers with a laugh, catching Cas’s hand and tangling his fingers with it

“Now why would I be the cause of it?” Cas asks, feigning confusion, and Dean realises what he’s said, and flushes deep.

“I—”

Cas tugs him back toward the forge. The tiny room is made smaller by the still too-great, yet very tiny, space between them.

“You’re not a little tipsy?” He asks.

“With the heat of this place, I’ll soon sweat it out of me, if I am,” he answers. Castiel chuckles.

“Just so. Do you know much about smithing?”

Actually, Dean is proficient—and maybe more than proficient. He’s good at it, brain forged—and perhaps forged is a word almost too appropriate—to the mechanics of metal and machinery. But he likes it when Cas teaches him things. He likes it a lot. So he lies.

“No,” he shakes his head. “Not really.”

“Would you like to learn?”

Dean smiles.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

Cas exhales affectionately, tugging Dean closer yet to the forge, and picking out a smaller hammer than the one he had wielded.

“You don’t think I’m strong enough to handle that?” Dean asks, nodding to the bigger hammer.

Cas huffs.

“No, I think you capable enough to handle the harder work of more delicate tasks,” Castiel answers. Dean laughs, and Cas hands him the hammer.

“What am I making?”

“A bell hook,” Cas answers. Dean frowns quizzically. “For Cathy,” he clarifies, “bells around her feet so we can hear where she is when she’s in flight.”

“Is Bobby paying you for this?” Dean raises his eyebrows. Cas laughs warmly. “No, I’m being serious!” He exclaims.

“I eat for free, every Sunday, and many lunches, in the Eyrie—”

“And I eat for free, every dinner, here,” Dean shakes his head. “Is he paying you? I’ll pay you.”

“He offered payment, I turned it down—”

“Well, you shouldn’t have,” Dean glares. Cas’s expression twitches at the look. “Cas—”

“I’ve everything I need,” Cas answers softly. Dean turns, angrily, to the tools in his hand, and is about to start up, when Cas asks, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

Dean hesitates. Yes he does. A bell hook? Easy. But Cas thinks Dean doesn’t know about this stuff.

“No,” Dean shakes his head. “Can you—can you show me?”

Cas hums, and takes Dean’s hand, and guides it into work. He’s pressed against Dean’s back: in front of Dean, the heat of the forge; behind him, the heat of Castiel. Cas’s fingers trail up Dean’s forearm, steady with soft assertion, to correct some work Dean deliberately got wrong. Just for this. Just for song-soft touches like this. His skin is prickling, his neck thrills with prickles of electricity, his breath is snagging on every in and exhale.

But he keeps getting distracted, and forgetting to be bad at this, only a beginner, as Cas sets him onto making more parts of the two bells to be tied at Cathy’s feet.

“I thought you said you were a beginner at this, Dean,” Cas comments, still close to Dean, watching him work. Dean falters.

“Uh—” he says. Cas exhales in warm amusement. “I—”

“Did you lie, Dean?”

The question is warm as amber flames on the air. Delicate as the feather of a sparrow. Cas isn’t angry. Never angry, not with Dean. Even when Dean deserves it.

“I like it when you show me things,” Dean says, heart tripping. “Sorry—” Cas tips his head forward, the gesture Dean carries out, so often, to rest his forehead on Dean’s shoulder.

“You’re a fool.”

“I like it when you’re close to me,” Dean says, eyes shining, because again, the want is twining round his bones and making him ache. Cas lifts his head from Dean’s shoulder with a soft expression.

“Is this close enough?” He asks softly. Dean, lips parted, looking back over his shoulder at Cas, shakes his head.

“No,” he answers. “Not close enough.”

“You’ve a hunger in you,” Cas comments, and Dean licks his lips. His gaze flickers to Cas’s mouth.

“And you’ve been making me fast,” he answers. Cas’s lips twitch. “Given me new meaning to the word abstinence.”

“Too witty, by far, Dean.”

“I’m not joking,” Dean shakes his head. Cas turns Dean’s body softly, to face him.

“No?” Cas asks. “Now there’s a first.” Dean rolls his eyes. Cas presses his body closer to Dean’s, and this, and its intensity, steals Dean’s breath. “What about this?” He asks. “Am I close enough to you, now?” Dean blinks, lips parted. He swallows.

“I’d have you closer, still,” he answers, and Castiel’s eyes are warmer and softer than the flames of the forge. He cups Dean’s jaw, runs his thumb across Dean’s cheek. Dean’s hands are behind him, he curls them round the edge of the worktable in terrified anticipation. The room is amber as flame and flames of want lick along Dean’s insides.

“Closer than this?” Cas asks, voice a murmur. He’s close, so close, not close enough, not nearly close enough. Dean lifts his head marginally so that his nose grazes Cas’s. It’s this motion that pushes them together, softer than deep and running waters, into each other’s arms. Cas twines around him, his lips on Dean’s lips, and Dean shudders, the aching want which has been crescendoing inside of him like a perpetual dawn for months, now, finally able to crest into some great wave, or sound, or song. His fingers, which had curled around the edge of the worksurface, move to clasp at Cas’s neck and shoulders, he pulls him close, close, closer still. His breath is staggered, it spikes against Cas’s mouth and he gasps it into his lungs in blades and knives. Cas moves from his mouth, presses a kiss to his cheek, and pulls back.

Still, Dean gasps. His eyes burn. His lungs burn. All of him burns.

“Was that close enough?” Cas asks, softly.

“It was a start,” Dean blinks. Cas huffs, but Dean presses forward to kiss him again. Kiss him, at last. At last.

At last.

His breath returns to him when he’s lying in Cas’s bed, caught in those arms like Cathy was, when Cas took her and calmed her and carried her back to the croft. His breathing calms out, slowly, still coming in deep and hard, but as the night stretches on, and their conversation lulls, each inhale and exhale steadies and slows. He likes the feeling of Cas’s bare skin on his skin. Maybe this, at last, is close enough.

“Are you to spend all this night shivering, too, Dean?” Castiel asks gently. Dean huffs.

“Not if you stay wrapped around me,” he answers. Cas chuckles.

“The bed’s so small, it’d be hard not to be.”

Dean laughs. He bumps his nose against Cas’s.

“Good.”

Their limbs are near knotted together. Dean’s heart feels like it’s following the motions of the sea, a draw of tides, a sweep of waves, washing in and out of his chest.

“I’ve never done that before,” he says, glances up at Cas. “Any of this.”

Cas’s hand runs gently up the rope of his spine, up the curve of his neck, and into his hair.

“Does it scare you?” He asks. Dean is surprised by the question, and how softly and understandingly it’s asked.

He bites his lip a moment.

“Maybe,” he admits. “I haven’t…” But he trails off. He doesn’t want to think of Lee, and everything that happened afterwards. Not here. Not here in the soft small press of the bed and not in the envelope of Cas’s arms. He wants to think of all things warm and firm and gentle, he wants to think of the feeling of the sun on his face as he walks through long grass or of plunging his hands into lavender-scented waters after delivering lambs. “Is it bad, that it does?” He asks, peering nervously, hopefully, at Castiel. The shepherd only twitches a small smile, grazes the back of his fingers against Dean’s temple.

“No,” he says, “it’s understandable. And by the sea and sky, Dean, I’m so lost to you that almost _nothing_ you could do could be _bad.”_

Dean laughs, a bright bubble of laughter like a stream.

“Then work hard to find yourself again, Cas,” he shakes his head, “a lot of me is bad.”

“I don’t believe it,” Cas shakes his head, and leans forward to brush his lips against Dean’s. Dean beams against his mouth.

“You took me by surprise, in the forge, there,” he says, and Cas hums against his mouth. “Yes,” Dean confirms. “I was beginning to think you’d _never_ kiss me.”

“And what, the task was entirely up to me?” Cas raises his eyebrows. Dean huffs warmly, bumping his nose against Cas’s. “Well, I’ve done more than kiss you, now,” the shepherd points out. “Are you happy?”

Dean is practically glowing.

“Blissful,” he answers with a hum. Cas watches him a moment, eyes curled softly at their corners.

“You certainly look it,” he smiles. “It suits you.”

“You’ll have to kiss me often, then.”

Cas rolls his eyes. But his lips brush the tip of Dean’s nose.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he answers. Dean’s mouth twitches.

“What happened to being patient, with the hawk?” he asks. Cas blinks a frown. Dean chuckles. “What happened,” Dean repeats, laughing, “to working hard on not startling the bird, to being patient as the seasons? To use your own words.”

Cas squeezes Dean’s body.

“It’s spring, Dean,” he answers. “New life is bursting from the cracks, everywhere. _You_ know all there is to, about growth. Months under the earth, in cold soil. It seems sudden, above the ground. But this has been a promise, a long time coming.”

Dean chuckles.

“A long time coming?” He asks.

“Since I watched you wrestle with that sheep, the day I first arrived here.”

Dean’s cheeks heat, though for once the sensation isn’t unpleasant.

“You find incompetence charming?”

“It’s good news for you, I know,” Cas nods. Dean tries to elbow him, but limbs bound up as they are in Castiel’s, he finds that it’s impossible. “In any case, I find all of you charming,” Cas hums, and presses a kiss to Dean’s brow. Dean’s heart clenches. The night lulls them.

“All of me?” He repeats. Cas nods again.

“Every inch. Every word. Every whisper.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)))))))) hope u enjoyed x


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